The RIAA is at it again. When they're not suing 12 year old girls they're raiding the shops that cater to hardcore fans and give their artists the "street-cred" the need to succeed. But rest easy, friends. With the money they save by shutting down these places, they'll be able to fund even more new albums by the Backstreet Boys and Il Divo (I won't provide a link to either of their sites. Visit them at your own risk).
I await the knock on my door. I have to confess that when I was twelve, I recorded American Top 40 off of the radio everyweek. I went through a lot of cheap BASF tapes because I probably did it for at least two years. 40 songs a week for at least 102 weeks! I would share them with my friends and even made copies of a few of them. You see, like many music fans today (especially those in middle school), I didn't have much of a budget for going out and buying the latest album. Now I do, and the part of me that wants recapture my fading youth will pay dearly for CD's by those artists at Barnes and Noble. If they arrest me now, who will buy Air Supply's Greatest Hits? Who???
Oh, and since the RIAA doesn't have its own stormtrooper unit(yet), our tax dollars pay for these raids. Wasn't there something more important the FBI was supposed to be looking into?
June 17th Update: I'm not saying that those who violate copyright on a massive scale should not be shut down. If you print up 90,000 copies of Spiderman 2 and sell it to 7-11's around the country, that's a problem. But, misleading statistics are often cited to show damge where little or none has occured. My problem with the specific incident discussed in the NYTimes story is that the music industry and it's artists tacitly (and not so tacitly) supported the mixtape culture before they had an apparent change of heart. There are better ways to deal with things. The RIAA seems deperate.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment