More Punditry on the Record Industry

Remember I mentioned Jammie Thomas? Well, she’s appealing so maybe the RIAA haven’t won yet.

Wired’s Luddite seems to agree she’s getting a raw deal, and commented on all the bad press the RIAA has been getting for going after her (and the 20 000 other individuals they have cases lined up against). He clearly feels really bad about how everyone’s been all negative to the record execs:

“The RIAA, faced with plummeting CD sales and increasingly restive artists, wanted to “send a message” to all the lowlifes out there who download music for free and undercut their profit margins.

The message, apparently, is this: “We’re idiots.”

The RIAA, after all, is the guardian of an industry so antiquated and oppressive that having sympathy for these guys is a little like feeling sorry for a Georgia slaveholder after watching Sherman’s troops fire his mansion and scatter his livestock.

So when their first victim, Thomas, turns out to be a single American Indian mother of two making a measly $36,000 a year — latte money for the RIAA boys — you have a hard time picturing these guys nailed to a cross. But that’s the image the RIAA has tried hard to foster since some pimply-faced intern first explained to them what file sharing was. All of a sudden it was, oh, boo-hoo. Poor us.

Cry me a river.

Here’s an industry so bloated with executives and middlemen, all of them greedily slurping up profit like bluepoint oysters, that the people who actually write the songs and play the music — the “talent” — are getting royally screwed in the royalty department. It’s been like that for years. The Dylans and the Stones of the world might be able to rise above it and name their price, but for the rank and file it’s “Dance to our tune, or go back and rot in that crummy little club.”

The usurious nature of the business is the main reason that the average CD, which at most costs a couple of bucks to produce, routinely sells for upwards of $20.”

source.

Hmm I haven’t known many record industry exec’s or worked in that industry, mostly because I can’t stand to have a job. I hate trading my labour and turning myself at least partially off to serve someone else’s vision in bullet points. This feeling is what makes artists I guess. Or maybe some of us just repress better then others.. and become executives? Anyway, I don’t think a job exists that will make me feel differently. But what do I know, I’m young, I’m willing to be open minded on some things and record executives are one of them.

I will say this about the large players in the record industry though, they’ve collectively caused a huge mess-making machine (not the good kind of mess, and not one that’s easy to turn off). To combat the financial and environmental doom that’s looming, they’ve spent a lot on proprietary software and sent out some real impressive press releases. Here’s a classy one:

Patented DMDS Eliminates Waste and Greenhouse Gases Caused by Delivery of CD’s TORONTO (CNW) -

YANGAROO, Inc., (TSX-V: YOO, OTCBB: YOOIF) the industry’s leading secure digital media distribution company, today announced that its patented Digital Media Distribution System (DMDS), currently being used by every major record label, and a growing number of independent labels and advertisers in North America, protects the environment by eliminating the waste created by CD’s and the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the delivery of those CD’s.

(…)

Compact Discs are made from many non-renewable materials — polycarbonate, lacquer, dyes and various metals including aluminum, gold, silver and titanium. With 200 billion of them, they have become a serious environmental problem. Once the CD is manufactured, it is packaged in a plastic “jewel case”, bubble wrapped, and shipped many miles, burning non-renewable fossil fuel resources, polluting the environment and contributing to global warming.

Although an individual may keep a CD for 20 years, according to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), compact discs have a four year lifespan and a 2 percent damage rate during the recording process. About 1 billion compact discs weighing almost 20,000 tons are discarded annually in North America, and they do not break down. This conservative estimate excludes discs with defects discarded by the manufacturing sector.

source.

Hmm, leaving aside “secure digital media distribution” (and the much bigger positive environmental impact of those 1.6 million annual illegal downloads in Canada alone) we’ve seen little to no actual change from the industry leaders; the basic components of what they’re pumping out en masse are still straight up dangerous.

Environmentalists have been worried about CD jewel case disposal ever since compact discs first became popular in the 1980s. Jewel cases are made out of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a petrochemical-based plastic that is notoriously difficult to recycle and has been linked to elevated cancer rates among workers and neighbors where it is manufactured. Also, the lead often added to strengthen PVC can contaminate water, soil and air around PVC manufacturing sites.

Worse yet, because it contains a variety of additives and lacks a uniform composition, PVC is far less recyclable than other plastics. Its quality degrades after only two or three “cycles.” Greenpeace has identified PVC as the least recycled of the six major common plastics. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that less than one percent of total post-consumer PVC is recovered or reprocessed.

As a result, most municipal recycling centers do not accept PVC products, meaning that millions of CD jewel cases either take up room indefinitely in landfills, where they won’t biodegrade, or are incinerated. And unfortunately, the burning of PVC creates airborne dioxins.

While options for recycling CD jewel cases and other PVC plastics are limited, the Sammamish, Washington-based GreenDisk company will take jewel cases for a fee of $5.95 for up to 20 pounds. GreenDisk then turns the resulting raw materials into GreenDisk-branded office supplies including, you guessed it, CD jewel cases containing at least 76 percent post-consumer waste content.

Another way to make use of old jewel cases would be for art’s sake.

source.

I like making art out of stuff, don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying, RIAA could make huge sweeping good use out of all their multi-national-ness and networking to make moves that are really worth bragging about, but noOOo. Instead, it feels like they’re making all the wrong moves; punishing people for not being customers is not a way to gain more customers. Being cool is.

But you know that! You’re an industry of cool! Quit being assholes to regular broke people who have a hard enough time as it is! Do what you can to help us face the collective crisis of poverty and environmental collapse instead of wasting your money like this on legal fees to win cases where no defendant will be able to pay you the unreasonable sums you demand and people will be fans of yours again.

It’s not really complicated, but it is getting boring.