Time for Musicians to Step Up the Fight by George Ziemann -- January 3, 2008 Five years ago, having already spent 30 years trying to figure out how to make a CD without spending half a million dollars, I believed that the mp3 format, CD-Rs, the Internet, and ProTools were the greatest things to ever happen to music. In the half-decade that transpired between then and now, nothing has happened to change my opinion. The biggest obstacle to independent artists is the RIAA. Not because they're any kind of competition, but simply because they're in the way. Their misguided course of action against their customers really has nothing to do with us, or our music. In fact, it relies heavily on no one taking us into consideration at all, else the courts acknowledge that there is way more authorized music for p2p than unauthorized. Mainstream media finally figured out that there are acts that don't belong to the RIAA out there. Unfortunately, they think "indie" is a new genre, proving that they're still a couple years out on getting a firm grasp on reality. The FCC promised us airtime, but is anyone getting any? And does radio even matter anyway? Or what the RIAA is doing? While the RIAA's war does not involve us, the outcome still matters very much. In the unlikely event that the RIAA wins, we remain marginalized. Whatever they figure out to "protect" their work will also serve to lock us out of the market, since only "professionals" would be allowed access. Each "control" they successfully gain is a roadblock for the rest of us. Each time they claim downloading or p2p is illegal, it taints what the rest of us have to offer via download. It is in the best interests of musicians and music in general to get all this brouhaha over and done with.The very idea of "illegal music" is like an Orwell and Heinlein collaboration. The absurd arguments over legal issues and suing music fans have only served to completely eliminate general discussion about music. The Problem The problem is obvious. The industry is run by greedy morons with tin ears. To continue the popular metaphor, it's a dying dinosaur. In a perverse sort of way, it was fun to watch it stumble and fall but now, desperate and scared, it's starting to flail around, trying to destroy everything around it as it goes down. This is causing a lot of innocent people to be hurt, or at least sued. Good people whose only crime is liking music, as far as we know. As much as we would all like to simply put the dinosaur out of its misery and create a new holiday, it's still a pretty damn large beast and you've got to get way too close to it to even have a chance of stabbing it in the eye, which will merely piss it off anyway. Maybe we can poke it with a long, sharp stick, distract it and save some of the women and children. The Scenario Unlike an RIAA press release, let's realistically examine the current state of affairs. The mp3 format has finally won grudging acceptance, as evidenced by its adoption by three of the four majors, who made their best effort to kill it first. This is our playing field. They despise it. There are millions of us. The major labels have downsized their rosters so far that I'd be surprised if there were more than two or three thousand signed acts left on all of them combined. Whatever the actual number, the artists who used to work for the labels in 1999 now outnumber the ones that currently work for them by at least two to one. The RIAA is suing everyone they find listening to music. This used to be ASCAP's job. RIAA's lawsuits are on the basis of the Sound Recording copyright. ASCAP worries about the publishing/writing copyrights. ASCAP backs the RIAA but isn't very interested (at least not yet) in collecting from people for putting cover songs on the net. Periodically, they whine about it but they're letting the RIAA run this fight. If I already lost you on the copyright thing, go here for a refresher course, because it's important. Historical Note There's a saying about those who don't know history being doomed to repeat it. There doesn't appear to be one for those who do know history using it to fuck with the dumbasses who set themselves up to be the punch line. My usual advice is to the p2p users, whom I tell to simply not share RIAA music. The p2p subculture consistently ignores this advice, because they take more delight in the rebellion. As a result, they cannot be counted upon to change anything, although they could virtually erase the RIAA from the net over a weekend if they wanted to. So it's obviously up to the musicians. The average bar band knows more cover songs than they will actually confess to, much less play. But not a lot of them remember where the term "cover song" came from. For those that do know this little story, bear with me for a few sentences. In the 50's, probably even before that, whenever an independent act would release a song that was starting to gain some traction (and attraction), the studios would release their version(s) of the same song, but maybe Dean Martin or Sinatra or Bing Crosby or Rosemary Clooney was singing it, literally "covering" the original in the marketplace. This might be a payoff for the writer but, in general, it marginalized the value of the original recording. What We Can Do I mentioned this a couple of years ago, but the balance of power has shifted significantly since then, giving it even more potential. We can't persuade people not to share RIAA music; we can't persuade the RIAA to stop suing people. Useless endeavors. What we can do is simply unlock the songs from the RIAA, put all those "song fingerprinting" methods to the test, and make legal versions of all the "illegal" songs. Give away free cover versions of current hit songs. Or classics. Or even obscure favorites. People that download or share your version instead of the original are immune to the RIAA. Plus, some of the audience will potentially decide that they like your version better anyway, especially if the original song is older than they are. To them it's new. There are a lot of songs from the 60s and early 70s that sound better in my memory than they ever actually did on the record. Maybe it was a good song, but the band wasn't really that good. Or there was just something intangible about the singer's voice or even the way the record was mixed that made you dislike it, even though it was exactly that same quality that made a lot of other people like it. If the idea takes off at all, any time, effort, resources, thought and/or flames of hell we can cause the RIAA or ASCAP to expend on us instead of music fans is for the greater good. If we don't sell the songs, put them on a physical CD, or sell advertising around them, for the RIAA or ASCAP to challenge this practice would involve opening up a whole new facet of litigation over non-commercial derivative works that would take years to resolve. Or we can even pay the 9 cents a song to the authors and sell a few copies. Maybe put together one of those "compilations that music lovers dream of," which just happens to resemble your third set down at the corner bar. First of all, they would have to acknowledge our existence. The system to render the rest of us invisible is so well-entrenched that Billboard would have ignored the Eagles' first week sales if someone hadn't twisted their arm. The Eagles sold 700,000 CDs, but it almost didn't count because they were doing it wrong. By the same theory, Radiohead (reportedly 1.2 million copies) and Prince (3 million copies) did not actually release new music in the UK and are not eligible for any British awards. Then they would have to concede that we, which they lovingly refer to as "music's sludge pit," are actually some sort of economic threat to them going forward, which just opens the doors to insist on ALL of us being counted, too. This would seriously fuck with their "85 percent of the music recorded and distributed in the U.S." slogan. The RIAA probably had less than 10,000 new releases last year. This year, they're cutting staff again, and probably culling more artists from the roster, so there will be even less new music from them. They still can't compete with free, but they are barely even bothering to compete at all. A 14-year-old has two albums in the top 25 this week. One of them is at number five. No disrepect to the kids, but surely we can do better. The RIAA can't, but we can. Our time is now.