fillet-of-who?

Dear Consumer,

The Recording Industry Association of America. If you don’t know who they are already, let me summarize for you; They are a bunch of morons looking out of the music industry while single-handedly alienating music listeners and shooting themselves in the foot.

Ok, so maybe not every listener, but at least all of the ones who find their tunes on the internet. In essence, if you’ve ever copied a CD to your computer, listened to internet radio (Pandora included), recorded a song on your XM satellite radio to listen to later or downloaded anything from Napster, Limewire, KaZaA, Bittorrent, et al, You’ve broken the law.

And don’t you think for one hot second that you are outside their reach. The RIAA has sued corporations big and small, people young and old, the homeless and the computerless, even the dead!

So why would a company do such a thing? To protect their intellectual property of course. Unfortunately, they’ve become so preoccupied with protecting their property, they’ve alienated just about every demographic. The mentally handicapped are the only group that listens to music that hasn’t been sued by the RIAA yet. (citation needed)

“Well hold on now Travis,” you may say. “What if these guys are just out there protecting what is rightfully theirs?”

Let’s back up and look at the big picture for a few moments.

Back in the halcyon days of records, one needed a fancy studio to record the music and an even fancier machine to produce the records. Then you would need a PR rep to sell your album to as many executives as possible to get your name out. That is how you get your album into the hands of a million people.

Fast forward to 2008. The only thing you need to make studio quality music now is a quiet room, a microphone, and a computer. Getting the word out? Make a MySpace page. Now your music can be in the hands of nearly as many people and you did it all by yourself! Your mother will be so proud.

Which brings me to my next point; choice.  With all of this availability and niches (Turbo Folk, Mathcore, Powerviolence?), there are a lot more avenues in which people can people can spend their money.  This phenomenon has been dubbed The Long Tail, many niche items sold to a large number of people. The Long Tail model states that given free choice, users will favor the 20% of available options while the remaining 80% creates The Long Tail.

So let’s put it all together: Producing and distributing costs have dropped, leading to more small and independent labels not represented by the RIAA. User choice and convenience has increased through the power of technology, and yet the RIAA is still trying to sell us CD’s which - for them - have the largest profit margin. It’s no wonder sales are down every year since the dotcom boom!

But what of the oh-so-holy iTunes music store? That won’t help the RIAA at all either. Instead of making $20 off your Beyonce fetish, they only make $10, halving their profit. Or worse yet, you only buy Independent Woman Part 1 for a platry $0.99, thereby reducing their total profit by over a factor of 20!

For you, this is great. If this was 1994 however, you would have bought her whole CD as you would have had no choice.

THAT is the reason their profits are down. We were being swindled. It has NOTHING to do with the fact that people are stealing music.

Sincerely,

Travis