greatbear | Fuck you, Hillary Rosen

So the RIAA thinks that suing a 12 year old girl of a single mom/low income family will help to bring their dysfunctional industry back into what they consider profitability. That's a real peach. I can see it now: People will rush to the music stores and buy armloads of CDs as they ally with the industry to protect them against an onslaught of terrorism wrought by prepubescent schoolgirls.

Give me a fucking break.

The music industry can scream all they want about lost profits. They are just reaping what they have sown in the last several years. Instead of varied, quality artists, they foist manufactured, cookie-cutter, focus-group approved aural gruel into what they see as huddled hungry masses. Suddenly, the masses don't like what they are tasting.

For years the musical landscape has been controlled and shaped by a select few very large companies. Gone are the days when a radio DJ would spin what he felt to be the 'next big thing'. Instead, radio sits at the bottom of the rotting food chain, being told what to play and when to play it by various members of this 'industry'. If a manufactured boy band sold well, then a new and improved model should do even better! Let's maximize their exposure, leverage the media outlets and carpet-bomb the public with our product, and they will buy. And buy again.

Well, it worked for a while, but people arent quite that stupid.

An informed consumer is the bane to those who peddle tainted goods. And tainted just doesnt begin to describe what passes for music nowadays. As people become more connected, they will learn from each other that the the new tune from the 98 N'Back Sync Degrees that sounded pretty cool is the only thing on that 20 dollar CD that is worth anything. The rest sucks, or sounds the same. Well, since they dont sell singles in most cases, people who value their coin (this is increasingly popular these days) will save their money and spend it on something else. Those who are technically savvy will get that single by itself by whatever means anyway. More often than not, those same tech-savvy folk have already found out that the rest of the music from said band sucks, and arent gonna even consider it.

The problem with record companies is that they see every downloaded song as a missed sale. That is utter bullshit. Some even consider advance air play of an already established blockbuster band as potentially lost sales, so steps are taken to control prior access to the new product until a well publicized date. The doors are flung open and the industry basks in the profit flow of their next engineered success. Regardless of the fact that it's any good or not.

Most agree that the latest Metallica CD sounds like ass.

As I stated before, this industry is paying the price for it's bluster and arrogance. Quality product that just isnt there, prices far too high, and saturation exposure. There are no guarantees as to the quality of their product. If you dont like it, that's tough. You aint getting your money back. You could buy just about anything else out there save for movies and software and be able to return it if you are dissatisfied. Not that CD. It sucks? Too fucking bad, You should have listened to it before.... oh wait... there is no way to do this 'legally' in most cases. Where was I? Oh yeah... too bad.

Disclaimer time again: Nowhere am I saying that there isnt good music out there. It's all subjective, of course. You might love everything that Selenium Dijon has put out and will blindly buy whatever is released next. Good for you. I have no problem with that. There are tons of great artists and bands out there. It's finding them that's the tough part nowadays. You wont find much on the radio (see above). Word of mouth, borrowing disks, pulling from websites are some of the options. So are copies of CDs from friends, downloads from p2p networks and other bootleg means. Far too often I go looking in stores for a CD from some band who's music I got from my favorite p2p filesharing app and come up emtpy handed. There, my friends, is a lost sale. I went looking, and there was no product. Why? It's usually obscure, out of print, or not available here. Hey, not my problem. I'll just keep what I have, and see if it ever becomes available here.

No industry but the movie and music industry so explicitly treats every consumer as a potential thief. You cant return a CD once you opened it because you had listened to, and potentially copied the contents. Yeah, you get another copy if the media is defective, but that's it.

The entertainment industry is taking more and more steps limiting what consumers can do with the CDs they purchase. More often than not this involves some sort of copy protection that renders the disk unreadable in a computer CD drive. The problem with this is that it also screws up standalone players and people who use a computer as their main entertainment source for some reason (think students in a dorm room). It wont play? Tough, you bought it. My feeling is that if the disk will not play in ANY player I have, I consider it defective, and will return it. If I get another disk with the same 'defect' it goes back again. if I kept getting handed 'defective' disks, I will have to complain to the store that the entire product line is unuseable by me and I demand a refund. More often than not, this will result in a refund for most people, and will result in disks returned to the manufacturer. More lost sales for them. Never mind the fact that ANY disk can be copied by one means or another.

The law has guaranteed me the right to do whatever I want with the CDs I buy. This is called the 'right of first sale'. I am legally able to make copies of the CD for my own use, loan the CD to friends, 'format shift' by making an mp3 of it and playing it on my computer or portable player, and selling it when I am tired of it as long as any copies I made go with it or are destroyed. I will not stand for any technological or legal revocations of this right. You shouldnt either.

Peer-to-peer sharing of music files wont stop. No amount of lawsuits will end it, and if some technical means gets put into place in the internet infrastructure to stop it, it will be defeated by the next day. This genie is so for out of the fucking bottle and will never be stuffed back in.

In closing, support your favorite bands, and do whatever you can to find those obscure gems. Give mp3.com a listen. You might even find one of my ex's there.