Realm of the Imponderable

random musings

Lately I've been blogging less and less. It seems either I'm getting less interested in the world around me, or in recording what's going on. Or maybe it's just that nothing really interesting is going on.

Some random thoughts about things I've seen over the last few months:

I found out from a friend here a few months ago a little tidbit of information about how recording industries work. Though the authenticity of the information sources may be questioned, I think that one conclusion that we can certainly make is that the recording industries are far more interested in making money than in promoting the music of the artistes that pay them to do so.

My economics teacher made a very interesting observation about the way criminal organizations work. In the context of economics, they behave like a monopoly. What does a monopoly do? They have exclusive control of a product or service, they have the power to control the supply and hence the price of this product and they will actively work to ensure that they stay the exclusive producer of this product. Sound familiar, recording industry?

You are the conduit through which artistes reach the people, their audience. Most fledgling musicians don't have the clout or resources to reach the the general public with their music (beyond their own local area where presumably they do performances etc.) so they need a little big brother to come along and give them a helping hand to reach the wider audience. Ideally the way it works is, they come to you, make a recording, you distribute their music out to the big wide world and you get a cut of the profit. Of course, there are kinks; maybe the music won't sell so you end up losing money.... shit happens. It's understandable that you take some precautions to protect yourself from things like this happening too often. But here's the bottomline: you're providing the artistes a service. You are the middleman between the musician and his/her audience. The poor guy is not your bitch for you to screw one day and throw out the next like yesterday's garbage, yet that is what seems to be happening. Here's why:

Somewhere along the way, a secret little amendment was made to the law about contracts that musicians sign with the recording companies. It classifies the music composed as a "work for hire" that the artiste does for the company. That means that once it's given to them, it's theirs and not the artist's anymore. They can't do squat to get it back. If you want proof just google "work for hire" and "recording industry" and you'll see billions of articles about this. So they're swindling the poor guy out of his original compositions and happily keeping the profits, paying him only a pittance.

Now you also need to ask, how does a new musician promote his stuff? Radio seems to be the most powerful option. Pandora and other online streaming sites are a good alternative, and I'll write more on that later. For the radio, you get a song played and millions of people get to hear it. If they like it, millions of people are going to want to buy your music. Who controls what gets played on the radio? Record companies! So... they control not only the distribution, but also who gets the most exposure and hence, who's going to make it big. How do talentless people like Britney Spears get up there? Some guardian angel decides to make her a star? Kind of... a guardian angel in the shape of a music company that spends millions promoting songs she sings but doesn't compose. So what this means in the end is... the most successful artistes are not always the best ones, but the ones that the record labels promote the most. That looks like a huge flaw in the system.

Then there's DRM. In this day and age the internet makes it easy to get any music you like for the price of a few megabytes of bandwidth. That puts the middleman, a.k.a. the record labels, out of the picture. You can argue that this means the musicians and the distributors don't get paid. More correctly, the distributors aren't getting paid... the artistes are getting paid a pittance already thanks to the exploitation of the aforementioned party. So the big labels respond with DRM and the RIAA. DRM is there to limit the use of the music product to what the producer thinks is fair use. That means if they think it's not fair to let you put your mp3 file on anything other then an ipod, you can't. What if you owned a Creative Zen instead of an ipod? Tough luck... Yet that's precisely what Apple's DRM software on i-tunes does. Currently they're in a deep puddle of crap about it and I haven't bothered to follow it and see if it's been resolved.

Now for the RIAA. They use bullying and fear tactics to try to scare people away from downloading illegal music. A few weeks ago some poor woman lost a lawsuit and was fined $200,000, more than she would ever be able to pay. The reason? Could be any number of things... maybe there was more compelling evidence against her than in other cases where the defendant contested the case, maybe the jury was sympathetic to the RIAA, maybe the RIAA used underhanded means to influence the jury, maybe the woman just didn't have the money to hire a good lawyer... I don't think we'll figure out why this case eventually spat out a guilty verdict. What's telling is the punishment meted out to her. $200,000 for illegally downloading / uploading 20-something songs!!?!?! Clearly she's being made an example of. So when someone analyzes the potential cost / gain of illegally downloading music they'll go, okay, the chance of me getting caught is this much, add to that what will I get fined if I do get caught and... oops it's now $200,000... that's what the RIAA hopes. But... but but but... the number of illegal music downloads has done anything but decrease!

Pandora. It's a great idea, allows users to customize their own personal music station to their own taste. They get to hear music not only from the groups / artistes they like but every now and then Pandora will throw in someone they've never heard of before, but with a similar style to what they like. Seems like a great way for musicians to advertise. And it's not like it's going to replace the CD anytime soon; you don't have complete control over what you get to listen to, you can't play this anytime, anywhere, only when you're at your computer with an internet connection. But nooo... RIAA sees this as a threat to its profits, and does everything in its power to shut it down. Net result... people outside the US can't listen to it anymore. Pandora itself is paying significantly more for its license to stream music and I don't know how much longer it will last against the relentless onslaught of the greedy bureaucrats in the RIAA.

So... in a nutshell. End users get shafted because of DRM. Artistes get shafted because they can't effectively use Pandora, radio and other means to advertise their stuff, and on top of that they get swindled by the record labels. And the record labels get shafted because instead of adapting and changing their business model for the internet age, they chose to be technophobic, stick to an old fashioned distribution system and force everyone to comply with them. Now the smart artistes make their own record labels, the smart consumers download their music anyway and don't get caught, the patriotic consumers support their favorite artistes by buying their CDs, the unlucky consumers get caught downloading music and get ass raped by the RIAA, and the RIAA continues to send out zillions of lawsuits to random people and frankly IMO most of these lawsuits should be on the Stella awards.

BTW if you want to see how the RIAA works check out the blog called RecordingIndustryVsThePeople.