Music, RIAA and that Whole Mess

I want to start off this blog entry first with my take and interest in music. When I was younger I loved to listen to music and it wasn’t hard to find tons of good music. AC/DC, Def Leapard, Heart, Phil Collins and I had a taste for variaty, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers and yep even a bit of Metallica. I had no problems spending $10 on a cassette tape back then, most of the songs on the tape were good and the price wasn’t all that bad either, which was great because I also liked to do other things like go see a movie and so forth.
But how the times have changed, cassette tapes are pretty much gone replaced by compact disc, the prices have gone up and I can even make a comparison. AC/DC Highway to hell, I paid $8 for it way back when on tape, when it was re-released on compact disc I saw the price was $15. Highway to Hell was not AC/DC best work so I can’t help but imagine cd sales did not do well. Today I don’t think you can find that cd in a store, well except maybe a hock shop or used store. Compact discs on average were about $15 to $25 so suddenly not so affordable anymore, well not for an active teenage. I used to make a few dollars here and there so I could go to a movie, by at least one tape, some junk for the local convience store etc. almost every week, so I bought most of the time 4 tapes each month, but with the higher priced compact disc that turned into a cd every 2 to 3 weeks. So I went from buying 48 (actually more like over 50) tapes a year down to about 15 or so per year, that’s a big drop. And I wasn’t going to reduce or even stop my other activities which cost money like going to the movies and so forth just so I could put more money into buying music, so with at lesst me record companies lost sales. I know I’m just one person but the same could be said for most of my friends and I can’t help to image we were not the only ones. The amount of music I would buy would drop even more as the music on compact discs started to suck, it reached a point you were lucky if at least two songs were ok, 4 or more became a miracle. Today I’m not even close to being a teenager anymore and I have to imagine with the price of everything having sky rocketed that it’s possibly safe to assume that few teenagers today buy 50+ compact disc a year today, especially now with services like iTunes. It’s not hard to see the quantity of compact discs being sold has gone done dramatically because of price and the contents generally suck except maybe one or two songs. I just can’t spend my hard earned money even if it’s just $15 to $20 on something with so little to offer.

Which brings me to how many compact discs do I buy today, very few. Def Leppard one of my all time favorite bands hasn’t realesed anything worth listening to in a long time so the last cd I bought from them was Slang, they have released a few albums since and they all sucked. AC/DC also released a new album Black Ice and I only liked one song from it the rest not so much, so I did not buy their latest. Even my former god Ozzy Osborne’s new album wasn’t even good two songs that’s it. And that seems to be the theme with albums now a days, they have maybe one or two songs if you are lucky and the rest are crap and I’m not spending good money on mostly crap. But occasionally and to my surprise mostly in the country music scene I do find myself falling in love with most or all of an album and buying the cd. Toby Keith, Alan Jackson and so forth, but even so I rarely buy a compact disc.

So if I don’t buy many cd etc. then why do I have Aimp2 installed on my computer. I do occasionally buy an mp3 online, most come from iTunes but I have tried some others and have been very dissappointed. All the others are now gone and thanks to drm I have a few mp3′s that are worthless so I am very wary of buying a song online today, even from iTunes. I just don’t want to spend a lot of money and find in the future that all that money went to waste. So for now I mostly listen to music on the radio (Sirius love the 80′s channel). I do not pirate any music but if I ever find a way to remove the drm on my now useless mp3′s I will. And don’t use p2p, I did once. I record nature etc. videos and share those videos with fellow enthusiast online who also share videos they have recorded. We looked at p2p as a means to share those videos, too large for e-mail etc. but we found that p2p has the same problem as just running a file server, lack of bandwidth. As long as only one person was download from you it was ok, but when 2, 3 or more started downling from you oh oh. The current solution we have for this problem is we each have paid accounts with Rapidshare.com, we use hjsplit to split the file(s), after some discusion 150mbs per file size even though we can go much larger and that way we don’t have to worry about the bandwidth.

Now that brings me to RIAA and the record labels and artists that support them. Douche bags pretty much sums it up. Suing the world could not have been a dummer idea even if they tried. Their new idea 3 strikes and you loose your internet for a year is just as dumb, and on top of that they don’t even have to prove you did it, just say so and it’s done. I can already see this power being abused by the RIAA, Record Labels and so forth. Good way to eliminate any competition and increase their monopolistic hold. I feel pitty for any country that makes the mistake of adopting this law, it will direct their country down a dangerous path. Nobody will win except for the record labels, not the country, it’s citizens and especially not the artists.

The RIAA should of handled this problem in a much different way. One way would of been to work with services like Napster and so forth early on to stop the pirating and turn it into a revenue model, everybody wins, well except the artist they’ll continue to get screwed. iTunes proved that this would of worked, could you imagine where the RIAA and the record labels would be now if they had done something like this instead of suing the world, rolling in money I bet. Instead they have set in motion their own destruction. I just can’t imagine the RIAA, ASCAP and the record labels that are part of this being part of the future in music just because of the way they have decided to handle things, I think they have created a spiral that they now can’t stop that will take them out as the internet continues to evolve as more and more artists learn to use and capatilize with what the internet has to offer to release and sell their music. The RIAA have lost a very big edge here, they will never be able to say anytime in the near future, trust us. That’s a big one.

Other things that stick out in my mind when I think about the RIAA and their sue the world compaign, which they have now changed to put the world in police control with unlimited power, and they are the police, another 3 strikes and crap with time will fail and result in even more negative publicity for the RIAA and their cohorts. Early on Metallica spoke out with the RIAA on the pirating problem. Now let me say this now I do think that pirating is a problem but what got me with Metallica is that we would learn that they had little or no idea about what they were talking about. They had no or little experience with the internet and Napster at the time. That blew me away, how can you have an opinion about something you know little or nothing about ? Unless you are just a puppet, I think they have a song about that. So I lost a lot of respect for Metallica, I used to be a big fan. But now they are no more musicians to me then the Back Street Boys, they’ve become the puppets I disliked. What also struck me, also in the beginning when the RIAA tried to bring the whole piracy problem to the media/people. They made the claim that piracy was responsible for the very low sales of cassette tapes. What the heck, it was no secret to anybody with a brain that was total bull, the compact disc was the death of tapes, which had me thinking. Was piracy really such a big problem ? If it was the RIAA would not have had to say such a big lie. And this also set the tone for everything the RIAA had to say from here on end, I believe once someone lies to you, treat them as a lyier until enough time has passed of them just telling the truth. Like Dr. Phil says “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior”, so true. Well the RIAA have not done so well in that area and I still don’t believe anything they say.

While writing this entry I started to think how much music I have bought this year. Well I’ve only bought 2 compact discs, that’s it. Sugarland – Love on the Inside and Zac Brown Band – The Foundation. Right now I have no plans or interest in buying any other music, just nothing out there I really want.

So let me ask you out there, how many cd’s have you bought this year, what about mp3′s online. And do you agree, the RIAA and ASCAP could of handle things better and that they are douche bags ?

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