Indie Labels Singing RIAA's Song by George Ziemann -- April 8, 2010 Some independent labels and artists have the same attitude as the RIAA. They think the audience is stealing their stuff, refuse to acknowledge that downloading is perfectly legal, and either want to tax your Internet connection or block all mp3 traffic on the web. In other words, boycotting the dumbasses isn't as easy as just avoiding RIAA product. Instead of my usual approach to this topic, let's start with one simple fact -- Last year's best-selling album was a collection of Beatles songs, not one of them less than 40 years old. Everyone in the world that wanted these songs has either already bought them, perhaps more than once (especially if your first copies were vinyl), or could have downloaded them from peer-to-peer. And yet, despite not coming out until September, it was the year's top seller. An album of remixes. If the cries of "You're stealing our stuff" were an accurate determination of the cause of the industry's current inability to sell records, a collection of remixes from four decades ago should have sold about 50 copies, not 10 million. I personally wouldn't buy a copy because it's an EMI release. But I am not a normal person and my music-buying decisions will make me pass on music that I like if I know the profits go to a company that thinks the audience is a bunch of thieves. I also do not bypass the retail and just download what I want, so save the pirate accusations. First of all, I use a Mac, so the entire Napster/Kazaa/Grokster period of time, the whole p2p experience was out of reach. I couldn't go there if I wanted to. When I got a copy of Limewire, my primary purpose was to share music -- the music my bands have recorded. I own the sound recording rights. It's my call and perfectly legal. The thing is, no one was looking for it, so no one searched for it. It was invisible. I used to buy a lot of music, right up until 1999 or 2000. I didn't stop buying because I could download what I wanted. I didn't stop buying over Napster. I didn't even get annoyed at the RIAA until late 2002 and that had nothing whatsoever to do with downloading. It was about interfering with my attempts to sell my own music at retail. And that still was not even a factor in why I wasn't buying music. So what made me stop? I put a lot of the blame on Clive Davis for fucking up Santana's albums, making him have guest artists on every track and veering off into hip-hop and rap. But it's probably really not Clive's fault. This genre-bending was not the cause of anything, it was the result of things already starting to go bad, even though sales weren't showing it yet. When Napster first appeared, it gave the labels something to point at and blame, and downloading has been the scapegoat ever since. And every year, sales continue to drop. Blaming downloading has allowed them to completely ignore what really went wrong. Worse, they have now developed tunnel vision. Even some of the independent labels think that ISPs could just "flip a switch" and stop all unauthorized mp3 traffic. Of course, much like the RIAA, they think it's all unauthorized. Stupid fucks. The Beatles CD should have given them a clue. But it won't. The ten million Americans who immediately threw down cash to get George Martin remixes of old Beatles' tunes aren't going to buy Hannah Montana and Lady GaGa. Rock and roll is still the best-selling genre but it must all be back catalogue, since the only thing we've been offered in recent years is Nickleback (meh) and the fleeting hope for a Led Zeppelin reunion tour. Money Changes Everything I see two core problems, the first being that it used to be the music business. Now it's the music business. Big difference. The music business used to concentrate of finding and developing artists, pursuing the arts and science of recording music. A great deal of its ability to generate income was artificial scarcity and dominating control over the retail market. If you wanted to make a recording, you had to deal with them. You certainly couldn't melt and press vinyl at home. The music business is focused on making money. They could be selling bottled water or tires, but they thought they could run the record business and chased out all the musicians who used to be in charge. There are thousands of excellent acts in this country that you're never going to hear. If you're over the age of 30 (worse if you're 55, but my 13-year-old agrees with this, too), it has become painfully obvious that the money people don't know shit about the art and science of recorded music, couldn't locate talent if it was crawling up their ass and they were already holding it with both hands. The first action they took when Napster showed up was to put out less music and get rid of half their artists. For some odd reason, that didn't improve sales. So they started suing people. Mysteriously, suing 40,000 people who were actively hunting out new music only made sales decline faster. And they still can't find a decent new band. Or maybe the musicians have finally wised up. There's no longer any point in signing away 7 years of your life, all your rights and even your name, especially if all you need is some marketing help. We have the tools we need; we don't have to suffer the fools. I thought the indie labels were smarter than that. Not all of them. This means it's almost impossible to determine which of the acts out there trying to sell music to you doesn't already think you're a thieving bastard. It's not just the RIAA. Like I said, I didn't stop buying music because of downloading. The truth is, I got bored, tired of all the damn commercials, just turned off the radio and got to work on our own recordings. That's what I listen to, and I'm a month into the next batch already. Not much other material gets heard. I stopped turning the car radio on. I've got a CD player. And an adapter that lets me just plug my iPod into the car stereo. All us, all the time. That's how I roll. My ears have become invitation-only. Think I'm stealing your stuff? I probably even don't know you've got any stuff. I've also got three days of music on my iPod that I bought and paid for before all this silliness started, and I haven't even started ripping the vinyl yet. I've got plenty of stuff. I was a music fan. Now I guess I'm just a musician, because I'm no fan of what the money people have done to music. And some songs I used to really like have been tainted by knowing that the person singing them has turned on their fans. They tend to get unchecked from the playlist. But really, all of that is more an emotional response. It's personal, based on doing music for 38 years, touring, working with national acts, writing about them, interviewing them, photographing them, mixing for them and, in the case of ShaNaNa, playing outfield for them in the Saturday afternoon softball game. (We lost. Badly. To a girl's team.) Sadly, the record labels have also taken a position based on emotional prejudice, combined with arrogance, technical ignorance and a denial of the basic laws of physics. What if we use logic? I know that this is as unfamiliar to most record label execs as the idea that music used to have dynamics, but I've actually seen some businesses use logic as a tool to figure out what's changing the status quo, especially when there's no easy scapegoat to hang it on. So why not give it a shot, just for the hell of it? Because they're not interested in the truth. They just want to blame downloading. It's so much easier than figuring out what really went wrong.

Or not.