What's more, I call to all musicians reading this right now to record independently! With modern equipment, it is possible to compose and record your own music at extremely high quality, and at very low cost. Further, as streaming technologies mature, it will become easier and easier to use an independent distribution model. This is what the recording industry is really afraid of. They know that the last obstacle to independent publishing was the difficulty of distribution. With new technology, this obstacle no longer exists. They can no longer strangle musicians with unfair contracts. We are free at last--use it!

ameoba: "independent recording" doesn't mean you do it in a garage. It simply means that you don't go through the major media conglomerates (Sony, Time-Warner-AOL, etc.) for distribution and promotion.

The way that I promote the music that I make is through mp3s. Its an incredible feeling to receive feedback from people in Zaire and Taiwan on the same day because they got my music for free and they liked it or wanted to say hi. Without the format, I wouldn't be able to do it. Plain and simple.

The amount of music that is being produced independently is staggering now that the internet and bandwidth are easily obtainable. Musicians at home are no longer left with just irate neighbours as their prime audience. Look at the amount of legal mp3s that exist on the internet. There is a huge potential and unfortunately, a market for music distribution online.

Indirectly, its the RIAA's market and they're afraid of losing the control they had even six months ago.

With less control over the artists, they're more unaware of the amount of talent that exists. And there's lots. Look at mp3.com's roster of creativity, for instance.

I'm sick of the RIAA's attempts to hack and slash at the music community and I say fuck 'em, too. They're so concerned about the bottom line that they're forgetting that markets and trends change. If they were smart, they'd work with the shift instead of trying to prevent it from happening. They're kicking and screaming because they're scared.

Let them. Those who throw tantrums don't get their way forever and well... We all have our computers complete with burners and fraunhofer codec already so I don't know why people panic so much when the RIAA makes another rash move somewhere. We will always have the tools to distribute.

What's next... suing whomever created FTP? MPEG?

I hope they'll go away soon.
One thing that people forget, time and time again, when putting up arguments like this is that a majority of the music that people chose to listen to is large-budget, commercial music. Yes, somebody can make real music in their garage, with a reasonable ammount of expenditure and effort. But, what's topping the charts right now? Overproduced boy bands, and sugary sweet bubblegum pop music. I'm sorry, but it takes a lot of work to make somebody who sounds like Britney Spears safe to listen to.

The listening public has been spoiled, and I doubt the average pop music fan could stomach a lo-fi garage recording, having been raised on the output of multi-million dollar studios, and recordings produced by uber-engineers who could turn my wet farts into a top 40 hit.

Yeah, I've got no love for the price gouging, media manipulating bastards at the RIAA, but then again, I really don't listen to much of what they release. Piracy is one way to deal with the situation, but, if you look at the history of the C=64, Atari and the Amiga, one large reason that the platforms went under was because of rampant piracy. I won't miss commercial music, but will you?
I found this while cleaning up my computer. Back when file sharing was a big thing on our campus (before Napster was the most efficient way of grabbing mp3s), everyone had an mp3 shared folder. I had one for over a year, it grew as the size of my hard drive grew.

Finally, when I read the news last November about the students at CMU who got their network access revoked for sharing mp3s, I had enough. I removed all the mp3s from my \mp3 folder, and placed this letter inside.


http://chronicle.com/free/99/11/99110801t.htm

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The RIAA sucks. The labels they represent choke their artists, and inflate record prices to help the Exec's to afford their 3rd mansion, their yacht, and the Lexus GS400 they want to give to their daughter on her 16th birthday. Do you really think it takes $18 to create, package and distribute a CD? Anyone with a burner is going to say "no fucking way", because we can do it for less than $3 / CD, minus the distribution. They completely ignore what's good music, instead focusing on what will sell (take Britney Spears, Hanson, and The Spice Girls for example), and completely fucking over any GOOD acts that are trying their hardest to get signed. They've shutdown sites that have posted LYRICS to songs, not the actual songs themselves, lyrics that in many cases listeners transcribed by ear, not copying it out of the jewel case insert (hell, many older albums didn't include lyrics anyway).

Is this fair? Should we stand to let the RIAA tell us what we should be listening to, and shouldn't be doing? No, but I'm not willing to have my network access revoked.

What should we do? Support indie acts. If you know of a band who plays at clubs and local gigs yet hasn't been signed yet, record their stuff and post it on your website, on the network, on an ftp site. Post acts from www.mp3.com. The RIAA is looking to abolish MP3s, period. Not MP3s of commercial acts that they represent. If we show people that the RIAA is trying to punish us for distributing MP3s that we have a legal right to distribute, no court is going to uphold any rulings in their favor.

They seem to forget that 99% of us that use / distribute MP3s aren't doing it to make a profit.

They ignore the other 1%.
Aye, maybe I was a bit too young and idealistic.

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