Virtual Records
Since the RIAA and all of its dinosaur members are trying so hard to legislate their continued existence despite the fact that they add zero value to the music community ... it seems to me that there ought to be room for an anti-RIAA record company. One which gives reasonable contracts to the artists, sells MP3's online, and encourages streaming radio stations to play its selections, without the onerous charges that were recently proposed. Let's call it Virtual Records.
The idea is to create a parallel music community -- one that's outside of the RIAA's talons. Play and sell only music from artists who have never signed deals with RIAA bloodsuckers. There's a music surplus anyway: ever since we learned how to record music, we've had access to more music than in any previous century, and this has led to a surplus of good music. It is just the RIAA and the monopolistic media that encourages the sameness inherent in the current system, and encourages the idea that anything that's a little different from the latest fad is bad. The sad thing is that the worldwide audience of sheep just go right along with The Industry's agenda.
I think the place to concentrate on is to convince musicians to go for a deal of the type described above. It would take a long time for such a system to become The Way To Distribute Music. Probably at least a generation or two -- long enough for the current popular artists to have faded away, and for their replacements to have signed up with Virtual Records. But it just seems to me that the current setup has such egregious inefficiencies, partly because it's based on unnecessary physical tokens (CDs), that it cannot endure. Despite the billions of dollars that the RIAA will spend on the attempt.
So ... who has already started Virtual Records, and where do we sign up?
12:04:37 PM
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