DISQUS

Kelly McKiernan · 4 years ago

I've never understood the position of the RIAA and Big 5 Monopolists with regard to piracy. For me, the biggest problem has always been finding music that I want to listen to repeatedly. P2P services allow me to download songs from artists I might like. If I find that I do like them, I generally buy the CD. It's not a roulette game anymore, I have a much better idea of whether or not I'll like the music.


The current RIAA model forces consumers to guess whether or not they'll like what they buy. When technology wasn't available to make a difference, I can see that. But when the tech is available to help consumers make more informed choices, the refusal to implement or even allow that technology clearly shows the priority of RIAA: to maintain the status quo of the Big 5 raking in money, not to provide a service for their customers.



Nice way of cutting through the BS, Jake.

eric · 4 years ago

I think there's sometimes some disingenuousness when people talk about disintermediation. It gets glossed over that in an artist-centric / listener-centric system, more artists would make more money, but very few (if any) artists would make the really vast amounts of money that we've come to regard as "normal." Steve Earle has a refreshing perspective on this: "Look, I'd love to sell more records. But you can make an embarrassing amount of money?for a borderline Marxist?selling 100,000 records a year, if you're willing to go out and work. I make what I consider to be an obscene amount of money. I do have to work for it, but I'm totally okay with that. I think everyone's going to have to do it. ... Artists that don't want to tour and just want to collect royalty checks and stay home are not going to be able to do that anymore." [@ antikoan.net]