Music Cartel Reportedly Planning All-RIAA YouTube by George Ziemann -- March 5, 2009 The greatest advantage to owning the U.S. Justice Dept. is that the RIAA can now work together on large products that will exclude their competitors without worrying about those annoying antitrust issues they used to have trouble with. So far, every mention I've seen of this comes from "anonymous" sources within the music industry, very possibly the same ones that said the RIAA was going to be crumble and be broken apart by Tuesday. So let's say I'm a little skeptical. Anyway, the story is that the RIAA members want YouTube to build another version of YouTube that has major-label music only. Kind of like MySpace did for them. That way they don't have to mingle with "amateurs," which I'm sure will be used to mean anyone not signed to the RIAA's labels. You know, the other 97 percent of musicians. When we were at mp3.com, they used to call us a "cess pool." And by "they," I mean record industry execs who are all now former record execs. Lasy year at this time, either the DOJ or the FTC was looking into the new music services that were going to offer music from all four of the major labels. This one starts out by promising to be anti-competitive, with the stated reasoning is that the amateurs dilute the advertising dollars. So they want to be a team, have a common showcase, and make sure the advertising dollars are all kept within the cartel. They will compete with each other, but no one will be allowed to compete with them. Price setting won't be an issue since no negotiations will be involved. This will be a helpful timesaver for the labels, too. They can share advertisers instead of competing for them. If that is, in fact, what the plan is, there's probably nothing we can do about it. Donald Virelli (RIAA - Grokster) is in charge of antitrust. So even if the FTC is the one that notices, the DOJ can overrule. This whole DOJ staffing issue is one thing Obama seems to have royally fucked up so far. Yeah, I know, it was Biden's doing, but Obama still had final say. We have not yet seen the implications of this yet, but if this RIAATube thing happens without antitrust getting in the way, government is still broken.