RIAA or no RIAA?

[JohnBoucher]

OK. It's simple. Stealing is stealing. If it's for sale and you don't pay for it, it's stealing.

Side Note: I must be the only Dead Head here on CD. Trading for non-commercial personal use of Grateful Dead shows has always been allowed and encouraged. They allowed tapers into all the shows and if you were a regular, they allowed you to tap into the sound board.

It's still allowed, but has some restrictions. See http://http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#245




And A Stupid Question...

If I pay $20.00 for a CD and I don't want it anymore will the RIAA be upset if I sell it on eBay for $10.00? I'm selling the original.

[thegathering]

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

OK. It's simple. Stealing is stealing. If it's for sale and you don't pay for it, it's stealing.

I hand my buddy my headset so he can give commands in CS computer. Now is he stealing from logitech for not buying the headphones? You really can't simplify a topic like that. Stealing in this case is based on your perspective. I see music as data, companies see music as licenses. They way you view music changes what can be done or not done with it.

If I pay $20.00 for a CD and I don't want it anymore will the RIAA be upset if I sell it on eBay for $10.00? I'm selling the original.

yes, that would be illegal. They claim you paid for a license to the music, not the music itself. That is why people have been brought under lawsuit for selling iPods on ebay that have not been wiped.

I know that this might be a little hard to understand but there is a lot of money being lost to people who pirate music.

I disagree. Musicians are still making millions of dollars off their music. I have yet to see any musician file bankrupt because pirates have taken significant amounts of proffit.

The RIAA blames every loss in sales on pirates and yet there are extremely large communities that are boycotting music to force the RIAA to stand down. The RIAA tends to spin losses even from boycots into more reasons for stricter legislation. Music has always been copied, "pirated", and purchased illegally. That's just an assumed fact of sales.






I might add, while I disagree with the RIAA tactics, I also do not download or pirate any music. Any music I listen to is either from free based artists that use services such as the older Ampcast to gain respect and reward for their music or it is paid for.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Originally Posted by thegathering

I disagree. Musicians are still making millions of dollars off their music. I have yet to see any musician file bankrupt because pirates have taken significant amounts of proffit.

The RIAA blames every loss in sales on pirates and yet there are extremely large communities that are boycotting music to force the RIAA to stand down. The RIAA tends to spin losses even from boycots into more reasons for stricter legislation. Music has always been copied, "pirated", and purchased illegally. That's just an assumed fact of sales.

Unfortunately, you are not hearing about the muscians who are being decimated by the pirating of music. Most musicians are on the financial edge as it is, if they fall off, or turn to other income streams to live, you never hear about it. It still is happening all the time. How many bands do you remember hearing only one song from? Did you have a band you thought was going to make it big that just disappeared?
Music has only been pirated, copied, etc. when the technology has made it easy. Prior to cassettes it was very difficult. Of course it took a while for the general public to talk themselves into stealing and calling it OK. When people made themselves believe it wasn't stealing and it was easy to do, they began doing it in a big way. How many people do you know that regularly copy music? Say each one of them has caused a loss of revenue this year of 25 cents. How much money does that add up to for this year in lost revenue? Does that sound like the number the RIAA is claiming it cost the industry this year? Musicians are not the only ones losing out on this. I know of at least one hundred recording studios that have gone out of business in the last 10 years. All of their hardware is on a shelf waiting to be sold to recupe the money their investors and banks lost when the businesses folded. That's a lot of people out of work as well. We may not be talking millions, but if you were one of them and you couldn't put food on the table for your family, you would be pretty upset. Everytime you heard someone talk about copying a CD you would cringe.

[thegathering]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Unfortunately, you are not hearing about the muscians who are being decimated by the pirating of music. Most musicians are on the financial edge as it is, if they fall off, or turn to other income streams to live, you never hear about it. It still is happening all the time. How many bands do you remember hearing only one song from? Did you have a band you thought was going to make it big that just disappeared?

Feel free to show me an examples of bands that was forced to turn to other avenues of life because of pirated music and not because they failed to make successful music, develop their image, or change with popular culture.

It may be happening all the time, but I would expect the RIAA to be the first to bring up cases in which artists were conclusively being decimated by pirated music and not being decimated for only producing one song or producing only mediocre material.

[LordTalps]

The RIAA is out to protect the artist... something like that. They're acting on behalf of the recording companies more than the artists. I have never heard of an artist receiving money from one of the RIAA's lawsuits, have you? Most artists make their money off of their concerts; ticket sales, shirts, etc. How much do you really think an artist is making per song?

Let's, since it's most appropriate, look at iTunes. Selling a single song for 99 cents, how much do you figure the artist makes? Less than they used to. It used to be as much as 30 cents, and now it's down to a dime per song. Over iTunes, a standard cd is making an artist a whopping $1.60, and that's only if a person buys all of the songs on the album.

Who's screwing the artists?

[Al Skierkiewicz]

OK,
I have been trying to get some hard numbers from some reputable sources so here is one with a pie chart and everything...http://cgi.cnn.com/interactive/enter...t.exclude.html
If you take a close look, there are a lot of people who have their hand in the pie who have nothing whatsoever to do with the performance. Of the $16.98 reported by Billboard Magazine to CNN only $1.99 goes to the artist/songwriter. If they are two people they split the fee. Out of that money the songwriter pays the publishing house, agent fees, copyright fees, legal, etc. The artist pays the recording studio fees, the backup musicians, the rental equipment for recording, all of the material (DAT tapes, cd blanks, etc.), engineering fees and then himself if anything is left. Often the recording company has a contract with the artist that requires a minimum number of personal appearances, guests shots on talk shows, interviews, shopping center opens etc. They may pay for the travel or they may not but the performances are usually gratis or industry minimums. For tours it is very hard to make money at the artist level because of all of the people involved. And if you hit it really big and CD sales exceed expectations, costs go down and profits go up. The hard fact is, after all of this hard work, with everyone and their brother with their hand in your pocket you are further pressed by people who are taking money from you without anymore involvement than owning a computer with a CD drive and some software. You don't see even a single cent per copy from the bootleg. If you further research the recording sales data you will see that sales has fallen from a peak in 2000-2002 while the costs of living has risen.

[thegathering]

Here's an interesting article that you may want to read:

http://www.bricklin.com/recordsales.htm

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Ben,
Exactly my point! The author more or less agress that CD sales have been hurt in terms of number of units. He goes on to state that the total revenue is up because of higher pricing but it is not keeping step with inflation. Musician cost of living keeps rising while revenue remains flat and sales continue a downward slide. One should also note that the article is undated but quoting four year old statistics and an RIAA data sheet from 2001.

The author goes on to try and attribute some reasoning behind the numbers by trying (without the benefit of sound demographic statistics) to classify the CD buying public and show that there is a perceived change in buying habits among the different population types. If you were to look at later data (the most recent RIAA data which displays through the end of 2005) you would see an even more significant drop in sales units. Now that gas is at an elevated level, the shipping costs are starting to skew for even less profit. I am sure this will be reflected in the dismal numbers for 2006 as well.

[Steve W]

Originally Posted by thegathering

Here's an interesting article that you may want to read:

http://www.bricklin.com/recordsales.htm

Nice article but 4 years old. I live in Toronto and ride the TTC occasionally. I would guess that at least 35% of the other people have MP3 players in their ears. That is a huge difference to the amount I saw when there were tapes and CDs. If even half of them (by your numbers much higher) were stealing their music just look at the loss. Read some of Al's numbers and compare with your ideas and see if they balance out.

As far as stealing music, I don't believe that art should have a financial value, or even be allowed to be copywritten. As an artist (paint, pen, paper, and drums) I don't believe that art should be sold. I stil pay for all of my music, but it erks me all the time.

As for the RIAA, I'm issuing people a challenge. Show me hard numbers from reputable sources showing them doing any GOOD. This means money going to artists after a settlement, or artists being reimbursed for their "loss." If people can show me even a single case of that, then the RIAA has done its job. If not, it's simply another annoying machine in our overly congested American dream...

[Cyberguy34000]

We're not looking at a moral issue here, we're looking at an economic one.


Sometimes people lose out when new tech, or a new economic idea comes around, they can either adapt or die. That's life in the free-market world of capitalism. We could have outlawed the light bulb because the candle making trade was going to be annihilated, or we could have outlawed cars because they put horse-breeders at risk. We could have done it, and kept those wonderful people employed in what they do best, but society as a whole would be denied these things. Legislating this stuff, while it does ensure people don't get brushed aside by the brutal pace of technology, just puts a freeze on tech growth and innovation, and denies society as a whole of many wonderful things.

P2P networking is very dangerous to business models based upon large production costs to produce a final product (such as Hollywood films), however the practically zero distribution costs means that small groups that can produce quality content can easily cast their net much wider than they could before. Meaning that if this became a normally acceptable thing in society, that large businesses and non-physical distribution chains have just about everything to lose... While small mobile businesses and individual creators have everything to gain and profit from. (Read "The World is Flat" if you want to explore this idea)

It isn't stealing. Stealing is when you deprive someone of their property. When a resource is infinite (as this technology makes things), than I consider hording that resource all to yourself, dictating who is to use it, for what purpose, and in what way is morally wrong.

The RIAA will do everything in their power to kill this stuff, because it ultimately means doom for them and the companies they represent. Now we can let the free-markets take their course, and have new innovative companies and ideas spring to life to take their place and make everything better overall, or we can put a freeze on technology so that these people and companies remain in power and any upsetting ideas are made illegal.




Your choice.