So I’m reading Ripped: How The Wired Generation Revolutionized Music by Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune. I’m about halfway through, but already I can tell you it’s an excellent dissection of how the rise of file sharing and new media has taken the power away from greedy music conglomerates and put it in the hands of fans and artists. It’s a must read for music fans, peppered with great stuff on Death Cab For Cutie, Prince, Wilco and Conor Oberst and how peer to peer file sharing carried their careers to new heights.
Anyway I’m reading along today when, in the midst of talking about the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)’s attempts at shutting down file sharing at major universities some years back, the following passage grabs my attention atop of page 49:
“Maggie, a sophomore at Marquette University in 2003, said that at the start of the fall semester the university sent letters to students threatening expulsions, suspensions and fines if they participated in illegal file sharing. The students had been reading about the wave of record industry lawsuits, and they took the letters seriously.
“A lot of people got scared because ‘Oh man, I have four hundred songs and I paid for none of them,” she recalls. “And then nothing happens. Nothing. I never heard of one incident when someone got caught. I think it was more to scare us. A lot of us stopped file sharing for a few days. For a week after the letter I didn’t touch Kazaa. But nobody got in trouble, and people went back to downloading.”
Wow. Talk about a what the fuck moment. A little back story, but Phil and I were sophomores at Marquette in 2003, and I remember the exact letter “Maggie” talks about in the above passage, or at least the discussion it stirred up amongst students. And her account rings true as I look back on it some seven years later. There was a brief wave of panic, then nobody did shit and everyone went back to downloading Outkast. I also remember how as a freshman working for Marquette Radio, the RIAA ordered us to stop playing RIAA-sanctioned artists (which is essentially everybody) without first paying them royalties. What resulted was the station embarking on a pain in the ass goose chase to get as many bands as humanly possible to sign waivers allowing us to play their shit without paying the fee. Complete and utter horse shit. Pretty funny how that one passage brought back so many memories.
But it got me thinking more about what a bunch of greedy, stupid a-holes the RIAA and these major labels and music conglomerates are. For years these suits raped fans of their hard earned cash, marking up CDs to upwards of $20 a disc, while at the same time paying their bands a horrificly low percentage of the profits. Keep in mind it costs the labels next to nothing to physically manufacture a CD.
Now a few people decide to get creative (and we know how these business types hate any and all things creative) and find a way to get music out to more people in a much easier way, and instead of making it work for them, the RIAA stomps its feet like little children and fight it. They fought it in the media, in court and in any other way they could. They could have used some foresight and ingenuity and saw that this was this wasn’t a passing fad but rather the business model of the future. They could have embraced it and tried to use it to their advantage. Instead they lost, big time, and they have no one to blame but their own inflexible, stubborn ways. It all makes me reevaluate why I still choose to buy CDs semi regularly and support these fuckers.
Anyway, read the book. It’s really interesting.
RB
