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This, That and the Other Thingby George Ziemann -- December 5, 2007 Today's offering includes a batch of items that I don't want to let slip past unmentioned, including Tom Petty's movie, Guitar Hero III and Rock Band games, CD sales, Jammie Thomas, RIAA v LimeWire, and a few notes on the Rock History research. So let's get right to it. Tom Petty Movie A couple of nights ago, totally by accident, I spotted Running Down a Dream, the Peter Bogdonovich documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I was skimming through the channels and spotted it on IFC (Independent Film Channel. I had only missed about 15 minutes and it's a four-hour film. Running Down a Dream is a compelling story about a band that's been around for a long damn time. Petty is full of wise quotes about the business -- there's the escape from MCA (Music Cemetery of America) by filing bankruptcy, the attempt to use Petty to introduce a $9.98 list price, having his house torched by an arsonist while he and his family were in it, the Traveling Wilburys. My personal favorite is when he goes to Roger McGuinn's session and proceeds to read the riot act to the producer for even asking McGuinn to play such a lame commercial piece of crap in the first place. But most of all, it's about a band. It's about a group of kids that got started right out of high school and have been earning a living playing music ever since. Great story. I've always liked Tom, anyway. So check your local cable listings for that one. Guitar Hero III and Rock Band I'm kind of amused at all of the promotional press for these games, none of which I'm going to link to. Here's my general impression of what's going on.
When you come right down to it, playing live is pretty much the same as playing a game anyway. You just have to learn more than five or six notes. CD Sales CD sales are down 18% so far this year. The record industry is less than half of what it was in 1999, just before they took Napster to court. Then they sued college kids, grandmas and grandpas, soccer moms, little girls and dead people. Still are, as far as I can tell. Also, new releases are down from 36,000 to 12,000. So they've cut 67 percent of the product, investment and personnel and only lost 50 percent from a volume point of view. For those of us who see the RIAA as an impediment to the future of music, we're halfway there. And the decline is getting steeper. Jammie Thomas DOJ weighs in on the Jammie Thomas case. First of all, they say that she's now objecting to things (like the jury instructions) she should have objected to while the trial was taking place. Since she didn't, it's too late now. That's bad enough, but it gets worse. While there's still no word on whether they think waterboarding is torture or not, the DOJ says a $9250 fine for a 70 cent song is "not unconstitutional." Of course, they say the same thing about wiretapping. RIAA v LimeWire If you haven't been keeping track of this one, the RIAA is in the process of suing LimeWire out of business. LimeWire countersued for antitrust because, well, it's the RIAA and we all know that one of those A's ought to stand for anti-competitive. You can read the judge's decision to deny the counter-claim (pdf), but it all seems to come down to one thing, namely that LimeWire is not really a victim of the RIAA's anti-competitive activity, so they have no damages to be recovered. Like Napster, it doesn't matter what the RIAA did to LimeWire, either individually or as a group effort, because they didn't do any of it until after LimeWire enabled the sharing of RIAA music. The linked files provides a lot of insight to the general idea of suing the RIAA for antitrust, even proposing several answers to "what if" scenarios that might pop up. It made me clearly understand why everyone who uses this as a counterclaim gets it tossed out, including all the p2p networks, webcasters and individuals using p2p. In each of those cases, the Other Guy wants to use RIAA tunes. The RIAA said no, which they have every right to do, no matter how stupid it is. So who could possibly sue the RIAA for antitrust and win? The FTC can, and has, in response to price-fixing, which created a legal "damage" to everyone who bought a record while it was going on. The only other large group I can think of to be directly damaged by the RIAA is independent musicians. Everything the RIAA tried to kill because they saw it as a threat was almost always something that the rest of us saw as an opportunity, with mp3 files, CD-Rs and peer-to-peer being the prime examples. It may not have been intentional, but it certainly was a stumbling block to those trying to embrace new technology and use it instead of trying to ignore and eliminate it. There are a lot of barriers out there that the "industry" put in place decades ago. Most of them are invisible, like Les Nessman's walls. Payola, for instance. More recently, they tried to leave the Eagles off the Billboard charts, while Radiohead and Prince got punished for being indie in the UK. History Research Kind of got bogged down on this while I'm trying to record, but here are a few things I've noticed: Disappearing News -- It seems like a lot of the major news outlets delete older stories on a regular basis, with Yahoo News and the LA Times being the ones I noticed first. Some of these items are going to require a trip to the WayBack Machine to find the actual source material again. Bill Haley and the Comets -- Tony wrote in to remind me not to overlook Bill Haley and the Comets because they had the first rock and roll record, not Elvis. This is true. But artist profiles and this sort of issue are better left to Dave Marsh or the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll. I'm looking for a story that no one has really told yet. I see pieces of it, but not the whole thing.
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