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Boycott-RIAA Still Beating Dead Horseby George Ziemann -- March 2, 2008 I started contributing material to the Boycott-RIAA site in 2003, before they (the RIAA) started suing people. It was so long ago that you always had to explain who the RIAA was. Now everyone understands. Sales have dropped severely. The fans despise them. The artists are shunning them. Our job is done. Today, I popped over to check for new info and the DMusic site came up in its place. Boycott-RIAA has always been a subsection of DMusic anyway, so even though it was an unexpected change, it was not really all that surprising. It was inevitable. We've really been done for a while. There were really only about a dozen of us who were still commenting there. Looking back, the pre-lawsuit theme was actually very simple. The record labels were (and still are) a colluding cartel, engaged in price-fixing and accounting gymnastics that prevented artists from ever being paid fairly. Our advice to get the majors to wake up was to not buy, download, share or, if you wanted to be hardcore about it, don't even listen to anything you haven't already paid for that was produced by the RIAA members. Naturally, we were considered to be pirates in disguise, no matter how many times we pointed at the thousands of artists on DMusic, many of which were migrating from mp3.com at the time. Universal had just destroyed it, after a brief period wherein downloading music from their artists for free was theft, but downloading mp3s from independent artists for free was a promotional service for which they should be paid -- by the artist. Personally, my message has always been that everything the RIAA does in the name of protecting its artists serves the secondary purpose of impugning the integrity of anything that it does not own. CD-Rs, mp3 files, file-sharing -- all the tools that independents use to spread their work outside of the system, as well as the work itself, are considered tools of piracy. I was much more interested in convincing artists to boycott the RIAA than the fans. The fans will go where the artists lead them. Anyway, most people that listened to us followed our first suggestion and stopped buying RIAA product, which is what a boycott is. The "don't download, don't share" part, not so much. My wife's first reaction was, "Mission accomplished? You didn't change the (copyright) law." I don't think the copyright law is the problem. Never really did. For me, the battle seemed to be to stop the RIAA from changing it. The problem is the four companies who own the overwhelming majority of all music-related copyrights and have twisted the law in such a way to justify suing thousands of people based on a theory that if others can see what's on your computer, you're distributing it, whether you know it or not. After a mere 5 years, the viability of the RIAA's "making available" theory has come into question and the testimony of their "expert" has been deemed "borderline incompetence." We've known that all along. MediaSentry, the RIAA's investigators, are now running into problems because they are not licensed to investigate people. Saw a link on Ray Beckerman's site a week or so ago wherein MediSentry was trying to not discuss their information-gathering method. The artists have just started to figure out that they'll never see a dime of the settlements from Napster, Kazaa, any other p2p service the RIAA squeezed money out of, not to mention the lawsuits against p2p users. Don Henley started asking around in August and it's sounding like he's getting ready to sue someone over it, along with a few of his friends. If I remember correctly, Henley thought the lawsuits were a good thing. Now that his record label is WalMart, things are apparently looking different. In 2003, boycotting the RIAA sounded like an absurd notion. Now it's just good common sense. It's time to move on. As I said earlier, the fans will go where the artists lead them. It's always been up to the artists but the contracts are just now running out. Radio is dead. EMI will be lucky to last another year. It's a whole 'nother world out there now. The RIAA is irrelevant. They don't want to be here on the Net with the rest of us and, more than ever, I hope they get their wish soon. I'd also like to say that I have no delusion that Boycott-RIAA was necessarily responsible for anything at all. I stopped buying RIAA music before I started boycotting. I think it had to do with Clive Davis turning a Santana record (Supernatural) into something that would make Santana fans go "WTF?" The RIAA has reached the point where, if we ignore them, they will go away because they serve no longer serve any purpose to the business of making music. Later That Same Day... Well, it appears as if I jumped to an erroneous conclusion, as the Boycott-RIAA site has been restored. Someone still wants to continue flogging the RIAA and that's okay with me. I still think it's time to move on. I'm still going to watch the comedy show that is the RIAA Spiral O' Death, but I no longer have an emotional response when I hear them lying. I used to think that they mattered, that they had some power over music. The only power they exhibited is the power to alienate the fans, the artists and anyone whose musical taste lies outside the confines of pop and hip-hop. What goes around, comes around and it's finally coming around. |
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