The RIAA sucks, and if you’ve been following the recent lawsuits, political meddling, and fear tactics carried out by the RIAA, you’d agree too. If you’re well informed on the matter, you might want to skip to my idea section, “What can we do?” If not, here is a brief overview:

In a perfect world...

You would be able to purchase music from any of the many online music stores and play it on your computer, mp3 player, car stereo system, etc. You should be able to send that music to your friends so that they can listen to it and enjoy it. If your friends like it, they should buy it, but if they don’t, no problem. If you didn’t send them the songs, they weren’t going to discover the songs and buy them anyway, so it’s no loss to the record labels or the artists. Sounds perfectly reasonable right? This is how people enjoyed music with LPs, 8-tracks, Cassette Tapes, and CDs. Well, thanks to DRM, with more than 90% of the songs sold online, you can’t do this.

Dee-Arr-Emm?

Consider yourself lucky if you never had to deal with Digital Right Management. To put simply, DRM is the technology embedded in audio files that prohibit them from being playing on certain devices. If you ever bought a song off iTunes, you know that those songs will only play on your iPod or on computers which you certify as yours. Why are such arbitrary restrictions put on your music that you buy? Because the RIAA is scared of losing their business model and revenue, even if that means more inconveniences for an entire generation of music listeners.

If you want to find out more about DRM, Wikipedia has a relatively unbiased article (but also technical), while Defective By Design is waging a full scale war against DRM.

Note: DRM covers much more than music including DVDs and other forms of media. Also, DRM doesn’t prevent piracy or sharing as every DRM introduced to this date has been cracked and rendered useless for protection purposes. It really just makes media ownership much more difficult for the consumers.

RIAA?

RIAA (Wikipedia) is a trade group that represents the recording industry in the US. In layman’s terms, RIAA is a public relations organization that is funded by the major record labels. Their official goal is to “foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality” which really means they try to sway law makers into passing resolutions that allow them to make more money. The RIAA is composed of many record labels, but mostly controlled by the Big Four, which are EMI, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. The Big Four accounts for 70% of the music distributed world wide, and 80% of the music distributed in the US

As you may know, record labels sign exclusivity agreements with musicians and produce, promote, manufacture, and distribute their music while receiving a large cut of their sales and recouping some of the production costs, which the labels consider to be “loans.” Record labels are the middlemen between the consumer and the musician, who typically don’t have the resources to distribute their music. In that sense, they have two customers, the audience and the artists, and that is an important point to keep in mind.

So what’s wrong with the RIAA?

It used to be that they were the only way for musicians to distribute their music. If you wanted to become famous, you had to sign with a label so that your music could be distributed in thousands of CDs across the world. However, with the internet, that is not the case anymore. Musicians can record their music at a studio (or their garage) and put them on the internet, selling and/or promoting themselves at the same time. The music labels are losing their business model to the internet. They would rather be selling CDs, which has a much higher profit margin than digital downloads. Instead of embracing this new technology that allows for better distribution of music and new paradigms of sales, they decided to hinder it as much as they can: DRM.

Concurrently with pushing DRM, RIAA started a massive legal push against pirates of music by indiscriminately bringing lawsuits against individuals under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which they lobbied to pass in the first place. While some of the lawsuits were legit, they’ve taken a shot gun approach and managed to sue a paralyzed stroke victim, dead person, twelve year-old girl, computer-less family, and the list just continues. What makes this even more atrocious is that the settlement money never reaches the artists, whose copyright was infringed in the first place. If you’re curious on this matter, there is a great article on how the RIAA goes about suing people (and in extension, why the US legal system is broken).

More recently, they set up an online website where college students can settle their lawsuits with a credit card with the same ease as online shopping. Again, with the same shotgun approach, they’re sending out hundreds of pre-litigation settlement letters, in hopes that some students will confess and pay up.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the RIAA is trying to change the face of the internet by trying to hold Wi-Fi owners responsible for their internet connection. Can you imagine what would happen if this gets written into the law? Every coffee shop that offers free Wi-Fi will have to take them down for the fear that someone might download illegal music on it. No more Wi-Fi at airports. No more municipal Wi-Fi. It’s one thing for the RIAA to dictate how we listen to music; it’s another thing for them to dictate how we use our internet. Do you hate the RIAA now? I hope so.

What can we do?

Gizmodo is running an RIAA Boycott for the month of March and their Manifesto is extremely informative and well thought out. There are other boycotts out there and I respect their intentions, but I wonder how much effect it will have. First and foremost, only the well connected consumers are getting this information, and there are many more people buying music than that. Second, these companies are filthy rich (from their virtual oligopoly status) and a month of active bloggers boycotting might not put a dent in their wallets. I’m not suggesting we don’t boycott; every little bit helps. However, I think we need to look into the other side of the equation.

Earlier on, I mentioned that the record labels have two customers: the consumers and musicians. So far all the anti-RIAA movements I’ve seen have focused on the consumer side, and not the artist side. From what I can tell, the record labels screw over the musicians even more than the consumers. Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference in 2000 highlights a great deal of atrocities committed by the RIAA. To mention a few: in 1999, the music companies successfully lobbied to own the copyrights to any of their artists forever (it used to be 35 years). Numerous artists, including TLC and Toni Braxton, have declared bankruptcy in the past to free themselves from awful contracts. Of course, in our society, we’re conditioned to view this as irresponsible artists blowing their money on drugs and lavish parties, but that’s not always the case (the RIAA must love the bias). Renowned independent producer, Steve Albini also points out how skewed the system is in favor for the big companies and compares the contract signing process to swimming across a pool of shit. MC Lars, on the other hand, makes his points via YouTube through his own song.

Like many things in Capitalism, the label-artist dynamic works on a demand and supply principle, and since there are much more aspiring musicians than the companies can support, they have the upper hand in negotiating. Having dabbled in the fine art field for a bit, I can understand the temptation of signing something to get a “start,” even if that meant selling your soul. If some gallery offered to put my photos up while keeping 90% of the profits, I would have signed in a heartbeat (although the fine art field is different in that galleries will never own your work). In the old days, signing with the label was almost the only way to get noticed. However, with the internet putting everyone closer together, this isn’t the case anymore. Artists don’t need to sign with big labels in order to be noticed and to distribute their music.

I spent fifteen minutes today pretending to be a musician (which I am far from) and googled for advice on getting a record deal. I found a good amount of information on how to sign with record labels, but little on the atrocities of the RIAA, and virtually nothing in terms of alternative. In order to end this terror of the RIAA, we need artists to boycott the RIAA. How do we do that?

For starters, there needs to be more obvious information on the drawbacks of signing a record deal along with success stories such as Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. Artists need to realize that they need to spend an ounce of their creativity into distributing their music so that they don’t sign into indentured servitude for the rest of their lives. Many of the Boycott RIAA movements offer plenty of alternate options for consumers (DRM-less eMusic), but I haven’t seen them offer any alternatives for the musicians. If all our favorite musicians keep signing record deals with the RIAA, it’s going to be very hard to keep boycotting the RIAA. I keep talking about alternatives, but besides starting your own label or finding a benevolent independent label, is there anything out there?

Let’s skip the labels all together

Imagine a music service where musicians can upload their music and sell it on site, or link it to their website. They can choose to have people preview it for 30 seconds or listen to the song unrestricted (but still have to buy to use in your iTunes or iPod), and like YouTube, they can embed the music easily into their own websites. Of course, no DRM. The service would work great in conjunction with Pandora or last.fm, internet radio that focuses on music discovery. Think cafepress for music.

I’m sure this service will face a fair share of lawsuits, from copyright infringement (which gets very tricky when bands cover or remix music), like Viacom vs Google, to malicious RIAA fear tactics. Nevertheless, it’s hard to argue that this isn’t good for music, and since we have the enabling technology, why don’t we have this already?

Update: I found some alternatives

Thanks to the loyal commenters on Gizmodo for these finds.

SellaBand - It takes some time to understand the whole system, but in short:

1. You buy parts (like stock) in a band you like on their website.
2. If a band reaches 5000 parts, $50,000, SellaBand will help the band record their music professionally and release a CD.
3. The music will then be available on their website for free, and the ad revenue will be split amongst the band and the fans who bought parts.
4. The CD will also be available for sale, and the profits again will be split amongst the band and the fans who bought parts.
5. No long term contract. No DRM.

Interesting concept. It’s definitely an system that puts the fans closer to the artists, and that’s a good thing. However, browsing through the website, I think there is something missing: discovery. Right now, in order to sample the music, you have to search for a band (filter by country or genre if you want), and then go to their page to listen to the music. There is no way of sampling multiple bands at the same time. They really could use a radio on their website, ideally with some rudimentary filters such as genre and language. I don’t want to make music listening a full time activity; I just want something in the background while I write. If something interests me, I’ll look over, and see who it is, and then maybe find out more.

Magnatune - Magnatune is easier to understand; they are the record label for the internet era. Unlike other labels, they give 50% of the income to the artists, which is unheard of. Even cooler, they let the buyer decide how much they pay for the music download. While this seems like it could be abused very badly, apparently the average album sale price is $8.93. They also have a radio which you can filter by genre; I’m trying it out right now. If you want to find out more about it, USA Today has a good article from 2004. Like SellaBand, it seems like Magnature also relies on word-of-mouth and the fans to advertise their bands. I’m not sure if they have already, but I hope this label signs with Pandora.

These websites need to be better known. If you have any friends that are aspiring musicians, be sure to tell them about it.

So what am I doing?

I’m writing this on my blog in the tiny corner of the internet in hopes that someone with more visibility and resources will run across it and get inspired to do something. I’m still boycotting RIAA, but that’s more because I’m content with Pandora and don’t need to buy any music. I’m sure that sooner or later, the paradigm shift will occur and the music industry will become consumer-centric again. The RIAA will change or die, and we’ll be able to take full advantage of the internet and other technologies that have risen recently, but they’re wreaking major havoc on their way down. I hope that when the New Music Experience does arrive, enough fans are left to enjoy it.

Labels: internet, music, RIAA, service