davidkin hollywood

Friday, June 21, 2002

Boycott the RIAA

My friend Fred sent me the text of a snailmail he sent to the RIAA. here it is:

Well, they finally irked me enough for me to wipe the dust off the poison keyboard. Here's the text of my snailmail to RIAA. Let me know if you can't handles gnupg-signed email.

21 June 2002

RIAA
1330 Connecticut Avenue N.W., Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036

Ladies and Gentlemen: Subject: Internet Radio

Two points: 1) Since I started listening to Internet radio, my purchases of your products increased. 2) Your lobbying efforts and the resulting CARP royalties imposed on Internet broadcasters are killing Internet radio, and a large proportion of them have stopped operating in the one day since the royalties were imposed (no big surprise, as that was your goal all along).

Now, therefore, I will boycott all products of any member of RIAA, and will instead do all I can to exclusively patronize independent artists and media. You and the independent media based on new technology could have coexisted, but you chose total war. You will have to do without my support from now on.

I will also take every appropriate opportunity to truthfully and accurately explain your actions to my students at the California State University. Some of them, I understand, are members of your core audience, and are sure to have a keen interest in the topic.

Wishing you ever-declining sales,

(signed)

Fred Condo, Ph.D.

So how do you avoid non-RIAA media and artists? Start by looking in your local paper. Go to a bar or club in your area. There will be music playing there. It may suck. It may be good, too. Good music isn't the exclusive domain of the RIAA. In fact, good music existed long before the RIAA. The profit structure of the music industry is based almost entirely about facilitating and controlling distribution. Because of the Internet, distribution is easier than sending an email. This is an artificial economy. The RIAA represents gaslighters in an age of electricity. This is not entirely good for the biggest of artists, but it's not much different for the rest. There were almost 100 years in there where this model worked for the record industry. That time is rapidly coming to an end. The record companies that survive will be those that offer services to musicians: advertising, booking, promotions. Digital music will be a promotional tool for you, the listener, to get up off of your ass and see a real, live show. Once you're there, you'll buy a ticket, a t-shirt and a CD because you liked the band. The potential for huge profits in this industry, at least the old way, which was to get huge and sell millions of CDs, is simply not there anymore. You can call it piracy, blame the internet, or Napster, or Open Source, or anti-corporatists, but in the end it's just a matter of evolution. Or rising tides. Or global freaking warming. Whatever it is, that sandcastle is history and what we'll now see is a lot of legal action, histrionics, etc. Even if the RIAA "wins" in some way by keeping some control of digital music, it will be at the expense of copyright (DMCA), intellectual freedom (e.g. taking action against programmers and teachers), and music itself.
comment 5:08:06 PM    

Dave Winer is back. yay.
comment 4:53:51 PM