More Fun With Math In a story about the sad, sad state of the record industry, Edna Gundersen of USA TODAY demonstrates the mainstream media's ability to parrot whatever they are told, even if it is utterly stupid. From the article: "To account for the consumer shift to single-song purchases, Billboard recently added "track equivalent" album sales to its Market Watch report, using a factor of 10 downloads per album. That yielded a 3.8% decline in album sales last week instead of 7.2% without the digital input. The RIAA uses a factor of 12, cutting the year's dip to 2.4%." Huh? Billboard takes the number of downloads, which we'll call x, divides by 10 and comes up with a number, y. The RIAA divides x by 12 and gets a number greater than y. This is mathematically impossible. RIAA Stutters, Takes Giant Leap Backwards By George Ziemann -- October 25, 2005 There is an AP story at Yahoo, obviously a press release, informing us that iMesh has introduced new "legal" file-sharing software. The service offers access to 17 million music files. About 15 million will be available for free because copyright holders have not asked iMesh to block them. Another two million "protected releases will be sold for 99 cents per song or a $6.95 monthly fee. From Napster to Grokster and right up until last week, the RIAA has claimed to anyone that would listen to them, some that didn't want to, Congress, and the Supreme Court, that 90% of the peer-to-peer content was unauthorized, pirated goods. A nest of evil, one-eyed pirates, stealing them blind and the prime cause of everything from pornography to bad breath. Sales are down, so they must be telling the truth, eh? Yet, given the opportunity to be specific, they only requested "protection" for 2 million of the 17 million tunes that iMesh has collected. A little less than 12 percent of the content. The other 15 million songs -- 88 percent of the available content -- were safe to share all along because no one really cared. The 15,000 people whom the RIAA have filed lawsuits against so far (and the ones they will announce in the next week) simply made the mistake of liking the wrong music. Bummer. Looking past this minor discrepancy (after all, they were only off by 80 percent), we move on to the weird part of the story. RIAA's Mitch Bainwol called iMesh's new software "...a significant moment in the transformation of the peer-to-peer model." I stopped at this point in the story and thought about that brief quote for 24 hours, trying to put my finger on exactly what the significant part is, other than that reality is finally beginning to bubble up through the cracks in the RIAA's long, melancholy tale of woe and despair. Six years after Napster, the RIAA is back to where it could have started if they hadn't tried to be evil overlords. Just think, if they had only come up with a list of the "illegal" music back then -- repeatedly requested (at least by me) and obviously much smaller than compiling a list of everything that IS legal to share -- those "protected" songs would all be compartmentalized, locked away, screened out and forgotten by now. No lawsuits would have been necessary, no one's college education had to be ruined, it wouldn't have been necessary to go all the way to the Supreme Court with the big pile of now obvious bullshit data that was delivered there by the RIAA. It's an opt-out system, meaning that unless you tell iMesh you want to get paid, they're letting it be shared free. Seems like the RIAA used to have a problem with that opt-out part. ASCAP certainly did. However, since the "creators and authors" of the other 88 percent of the content will apparently get nothing, we have a clear indication that this never had anything whatsoever to do with right and wrong or the principles of copyright, except as it applies to the 12 percent. The needs of the dwindling few. The RIAA always said they couldn't compete with free, even when they were trying to act like they owned everything on the Internet. Now, outnumbered in content by a 15:2 ratio, they suddenly think competing side-by-side with free is not only a good idea but "...a significant moment in the transformation of the peer-to-peer model." So the Stupids get what they wanted all along -- p2p that blocks their music. Now if they'll just convince Clear Channel to stop playing their tunes... The RIAA's 7-Step Spiral of Death Posted this somewhere else and people liked it, so here is a slightly edited version. I thought about making it a 12-step program, but since we don't particularly care if they recover, several steps were unnecessary. 1) Napster happened. 2) RIAA claims that sales will suffer because of evil pirates, mp3s, p2p, CD-Rs and any other handy target. Complains to government, asks for new laws. 3) Self-fulfill prophesy of lower sales by reducing the number of new releases offered to the marketplace, introduce childish DRM, insult and threaten consumers. 4) Sue a few college kids. Repeat Step 3. 5) Sue a lot of college kids. Repeat Steps 2 and 3. Sue another file-sharing company. 6) Reduce artist rosters and maybe an entire genre or two. Repeat Step 3. 7) Repeat Step 2. Sue everyone with an Internet connection. Repeat Step 6. They make fewer records, they piss off some fans, they sell fewer records, the labels don't make as much money as they used to, so they make fewer records... Another merger, anyone?