The growing hatred of the RIAA

BusinessWeek is running an interesting series of articles about the music business and the effects of file sharing. Got to love this lead in, "Picking on little kids and old ladies? What were the record companies thinking? They say it's life or death."

• Levy: Record Industry vs. Music Lovers
• For the Labels, It's Life or Death
• Record Industry Has a Bigger Problem

The articles are pretty balanced, but it's tough to present a positive picture given how bad the situation has gotten.

I'm a huge music lover and I USED to buy a ton of CDs (~2,500), now I don't buy any and won't buy any until prices are lowered substantially and this stupid practice of suing customers stops. I'm not truly boycotting the RIAA as I do subscribe to listen.com Rhapsody which has music from all five major labels and eMusic which is owned by Universal, but the RIAA will not see any more then their share of my $9.95 per month paid to those services. I've also completely stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store. There too I want to see the price drop. For now I'm just making do with Rhapsody and eMusic, given the quantity of music available through those services it isn't such a bad thing. Should the desire to buy a CD strike, I'll make sure it's from a truly independent label.

I'm also going to stop recommending any RIAA label artists. This will be tough because I don't subscribe to the often spouted misconception that the big five labels only release garbage music. That's a foolish statement that people love to repeat along with the non-sense about them only releasing CDs with one good song. For people who truly believe that they need to look outside the POP charts. The RIAA labels release mountains of good music, they just charge too much for it. Of course to be fair, I think the independent labels are just as bad as their prices are out of wack too.

This makes me wonder when we're going to start seeing independent labels capitalizing on this situation by doing something like adding a "we're independent" or "not RIAA associated" sticker to their CDs. If I ran one of these labels I know I'd start doing that to capitalize on the growing hatred for the RIAA member companies. I'd also cut my prices to undercut the major labels further while supporting limited trading of songs.

Posted by Kimbro Staken