RIAA continues to show thier greed

I have stopped the constant blogging about how many stories the RIAA's war on piracy is generating simply because there are just too many to keep up with. I think each day I look for them, there are at least 10 that I can read before the twelve o'clock hour. Recently though I came across an interesting read on how despite the fact that the RIAA claims to be winning the war on piracy coupled with the common knowledge that the RIAA is a lobby group for record labels that provide promotion and distribution to artists, the hundreds of millions of dollars that they have so far won are not making their way into the hands of the artists...at all. Meanwhile is has been written that the RIAA at the same time is attempting to lower the rate of pay that the artists are receiving for royalties which is currently just about 9 cents a song, with the rest going to the publisher and the distributor in which the amount is usually lowered during negotiations for distribution. Yahoo, Napster and Apple are all also on board supporting such a decision all while the price per song as you have begin to notice goes up.

So the 400 million or so dollars that has been collected as a result of the copyright settlements or strong arm borderline mob tactic extortion's collected, that money has gone not to the artists but basically back into how labels are continuing to fight the digital music revolution.

So why then do I bother to write about such a topic that just doesn't affect me then? I guess you could say that it continues to support my ideology of how if music was free then there just would not be an existing business model for it. Music would get made and set free and I really don't think that if you had a passion to make music, that it would be destroyed by the fact that you weren't making money off of it because that option would never have existed in the first place. The frustrating scruple is that major Internet portals are arguing that the rate disappear if the content is streamed. This presents an issue because you pay higher rates for more bandwidth to handle better streaming with less buffering all while you listen to music that the artist really isn't getting paid for.

I overheard the other day a cell phone conversation where a guy was talking on his cell phone and during the conversation the words, "If you are going to be a musician you had better get your ass into a union." came out of his mouth. I could not help but stop and laugh internally as there is such a difference between being a musician and belonging to an organization like ASCAP (my idea of the equivalent of a music 'union' which is supposed to look out for your music royalty rights). ASCAP does not make one more musically inclined and it should never be said that a music organization would be the end point for an artist who has a passion for making music. If you like to make music then do it. There are plenty of net labels out there to get your music released without having to worry about distribution because the Internet has destroyed the music distribution industry already so why pay to belong to something that you will ultimately find yourself legally frustrated with because they don't lobby for you, promote you or protect you?

It just seems kind of pointless to me to see the RIAA suing on behalf of the artists, winning on behalf of the labels and paying out nobody in the process as the court costs mount to near total winning from the case. Do you hear that giant sucking cound too?