[FA Worldmusic] Fwd: David Rovics: "The RIAA vs. The World"

[MassMuzik at aol.com]

Comrades & colleagues,

Here's an article just posted by singer/songwriter David Rovics, about the
recent downloading lawsuit by the RIAA. I think he speaks to a number of
questions that often make the rounds on this listserve, and he also raises
some other
good ones.

Neva
Music for the Masses
NYC

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The RIAA vs. The World

David Rovics

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing massive
multinational corporations with tentacles in every corner of the global
economy
including the music business, has just won a lawsuit against a mother of two
who refused to be pushed around. Jamie Thomas' pockets were not nearly deep
enough to mount the kind of legal defense for the occasion, but she rightly
thought that paying an out-of-court settlement of several thousand dollars for
the
"crime" of sharing music online was ridiculous. So she told the RIAA they'd
have to take her to court. They did, and they won.

The fact that one of these cases actually went to trial, the amount of money
involved, and the fact that the defendant could have been your neighbor, a
middle-aged single mother of two who was not selling anything, but was just
engaging in commonplace song-swapping via Kazaa's peer-to-peer network, has
made
this case newsworthy. But what lies beneath it are the ever-growing tens of
thousands of people who have been spied upon, harassed and threatened with
lawsuits if they didn't pay the RIAA thousands of dollars for sharing
copywritten
music in a way the RIAA, the US government, the World Trade Organization,
etc.,
deem inappropriate.

In spite of the RIAA's campaign to staunch the profit losses of its corporate
members by waging a campaign of fear and intimidation against your average
everyday music fan, the numbers of legal and "illegal" downloads continue to
rise rapidly. However, the industry's campaign is not just about robbing
working
class American music fans of hundreds of millions of their hard-earned
dollars. The music industry is waging a war for the hearts and minds of the
people of
the US and the world, spending tremendous amounts of money on advertising
campaigns to convince us of the rightness of their cause and the wrongness of
our
actions.

The RIAA is both powerful and desperate. They are a multibillion-dollar
industry that has been "suffering" financially for years, and they are up
against
the very nature of the internet - that being peer-to-peer sharing of
information in whatever form (stories, songs, videos, etc.). The internet has
given rise
to unprecedented levels of global cultural cross-pollination, and it has led
to a democratization of where our news, information, music, etc., comes from
that has not been seen since the days of the wandering troubadors who went
from
town to town spreading the news of the day.

The RIAA is trying to use a combination of the law, financial largesse, and
encryption and other technologies to try to reassert their dominance over
global culture. But perhaps most importantly, they are trying to reassert the
moral
virtue of their position, the rightness of their positions vis-a-vis the
concept of intellectual property and the notion that the fear campaign they're
engaged in somehow benefits society overall and artists in particular.

The success of their campaign to convince us that the average person is
essentially part of a massive band of thieves can be easily seen. Look at the
comments section following an article about the recent lawsuit, for example,
and
you will find people generally saying they thought Ms. Thomas was wrong but
that
the amount of money involved with the lawsuit is outrageous. You will find
people admitting that they also download music illegally, and they feel bad
about it, but it's just too easy and the music in the stores is too
expensive.

Obviously the idea of anyone being financially bankrupted for the rest of
their lives because they shared some songs online is preposterous, and very
few
people fail to see that. But the idea that Ms. Thomas did something wrong is
prevalent, even among her fellow "thieves," and I think it needs to be
challenged on various fronts.

"Webre doing this for artists"

The RIAA represents artists about as effectively as the big pharmaceutical
companies represent sick people. I'll explain. The vast majority of innovation
in medicine comes from university campuses. The usual pattern is Big Pharma
then comes in and uses the research that's already been done to then patent it
and turn it into an obscenely profitable drug (especially if it's good for
treating a disease common among people in rich countries). Then they say
anybody
else who makes cheap or free versions of the drug is stealing, and by doing so
we're stifling innovation and acting immorally.

Similarly, the vast majority of musical innovation happens on the streets by
people who are not being paid by anyone. The machine that is the music
industry then snatches a bit of that popular culture, sanitizes it, and then
sells it
back to us at a premium. They create a superstar or two out of cultural
traditions of their choosing and to hell with the rest of them. Sometimes the
musicians they promote are really good, but that's not the point. The point is
that
if the RIAA were truly interested in promoting good artists, they'd be doing
lots of smaller record contracts with a wide variety of artists representing a
broad cross-section of musical traditions. But as it is, if it were up to the
RIAA we'd be listening to the music of a small handful of multimillionaire
pop stars and the other 99.9% of musicians would starve.

The overwhelming majority of great music in the US (and most certainly in the
rest of the world) is not supported by the RIAA. Rather, it is marginalized
as much as possible. "Payola" is alive and well. The commercial radio stations
are paid to play RIAA artists and paid not to play anyone else. A strategic,
financial decision is made to promote a few styles of formulaic anti-music,
each style represented by a few antiseptic pop stars, the lowest common
denominator that can be created by the corporations behind the curtain. On the
other
hand, the overwhelming majority of great writers, recording artists and
performers are ignored, denied record contracts, promotion, airplay,
distribution,
etc.

In short, the RIAA does their best to stifle art, at the expense of money.
They represent some artists, no doubt - a few very well-off ones, the few
(occasionally very talented) beneficiaries of their money-making schemes. In
the US,
even the system through which royalties are distributed ends up benefitting
only the industry and a few pop stars. The comparatively little airplay
independent artists receive is measured by organizations like ASCAP in such a
way
that it is largely ignored, and royalties we should be receiving end up in the
pockets of the industry.

"Downloads hurt CD sales of our artists"

OK, so the RIAA's claims to represent artists in general may be laughable,
but surely they have a point when they complain about the annually decreasing
CD
sales of Coldplay and the Rolling Stones? Even if they are just a cartel
representing the interests of the few and trying to prevent access or
representation by the many, surely suing average music listeners is at least
some kind of
response to their artists losing sales to these free downloads?

The kind of logic that sees loss of CD sales for major label artists as a
direct response to being able to download their music online for free is
flawed.
It assumes that people would be buying the CD's of these artists were it not
available for free. The reality, I'd suggest, is very different and also hard
to measure with any degree of accuracy.

With the rise of the worldwide web has come an explosion of interest in an
ever-broadening array of music. People are downloading for free and paying for
new music from all over. When bigtime artists get loads of conventional
publicity and everybody can't avoid knowing that Janet Jackson has a new CD
out
because this news is covering the sides of every bus in the city, many people
will
go ahead and download tracks from her new CD if they can find them on the web
for free. But would they bother buying the CD in the current, rich musical
environment of the internet otherwise? Or would they just move on and download
other stuff from the independent artists they're constantly discovering out
there on the web instead?

I'd suggest the latter, and I'd further suggest that there is no reliable way
of knowing whether or not I'm correct. If the major artists are losing sales
because of the availability of their songs for free on the web, I couldn't
care less. However, I think what is more the case is they are losing sales to
the
internet itself, as a result of the blossoming of grassroots musical culture
that the internet is fostering.

"Giving away music hurts small artists"

This is an argument the RIAA is fond of putting forward. Sadly, many of my
colleagues, many other independent recording artists, believe it. They seem to
think that if the major artists are losing sales to the internet, it must be
happening to us, too. Either deliberately or through inaction, they don't put
their music up on the web for free download. Fans of theirs, it often seems,
respect this and don't put up the music either (sometimes). I'm convinced this
is
all born out of confusion, and these artists are shooting themselves in the
foot.

What's good for GM is definitely not what's good for the guy in Iowa City
making electric cars out of his garage. I constantly run into people who
assume
that I must be losing CD sales and suffering financially as a result of the
fact that I put up all of my music on the web for free download. Sometimes
they
are artists who think I'm something of a scab. Other times they're fans who
appreciate the free music but are concerned for my financial well-being.

Principles aside for the moment, on a purely practical level, the reality is
that many independent artists, most definitely including myself, have
benefitted from the phenomenon of the free MP3. Like others, the fact that I'm
making
a living at all at music - unlike the overwhelming majority of musicians - is
largely attributable to the internet, and specifically to free downloads.

It's not simple, and it's fairly easy to hypothesize one thing or another and
back it up with selective information. But overall, my experience has been
that I sold a few thousand CD's a year before the internet, and have continued
to sell a few thousand CD's a year after the internet. Gig offers and fans in
far-off places have multiplied, however, and in so many of these cases it's
clear that they first heard my music on the internet, usually because someone
they knew guided them to my website.

Every year, over 100,000 songs are downloaded for free from my website, and
many more from many other websites where they are hosted in one form or
another. This represents many times what CD sales could possibly have been for
me
without a major record contract, previous to the internet. My conclusion is
that
the free download phenomenon behaves more like radio airplay that I never
would have had otherwise. And it's international airplay that has led me to
tours
in countries around the world and gigs in remote corners of the US that
resulted directly from someone telling someone else about songs of mine they
could
find online for free.

The reality, pop stars aside, is that the overwhelming majority of musicians
who are able to make a living from their music make it from performing. For
DIY musicians who are not having their tours booked by Sony BMGbs booking
agencies, the most valuable resource are fans, especially the ones who are
well-o
rganized and enthusiastic enough that they want to organize a gig for us
somewhere. Through fans like this, we can cobble together another tour. This
process
has been helped immensely by the "viral marketing," the buzz that can happen
when music people like is freely available on the web.

I'm sure that there are many people who would have bought my latest CD if
they weren't able to download it for free. Of this there is no doubt. But to
think that this is therefore how the free download phenomenon works in general
is
extremely simplistic. For every person who downloads the songs instead of
buying the CD, I'd guess there are 100 who hear the music on the web for the
first
time, who would probably never have heard it otherwise. For every 100 people
who hear the music for free, say one of them will buy a CD to support the
artist. For every 1,000, maybe one will organize a paying gig. This may not
cause
a big rise in CD sales, but ultimately it doesn't hurt them, either, and what
it does for sure is dramatically increase the overall audience of independent
artists around the world.

"But people are stealing private property on those P2P networks"

There are many ways to try to compensate artists for original work,
scientists for ground-breaking research, inventors for great new inventions,
etc. There
is no single, sacred way to do this. There are many ways to support art and
artists in society and reward them for their work. Paying royalties based on
airplay, downloads and/or CD sales is one way among many.

If royalties are going to be a primary way artists are compensated, there are
many ways to do this, too. With CD sales, according to the current system,
the songwriter gets something like 7 cents per song per CD sold in the stores.
With radio airplay, the onus on paying the royalties that may eventually get
to
some of the artists is on the radio stations, and the radio stations are
usually supported by corporate advertisers.

If the RIAA really thought their artists could compete with the rest of the
world's artists on a relatively open playing field, they'd probably be busily
trying to create some kind of web-based infrastructure where corporate
advertising would pay some kind of royalties for their artists. If this
infrastructure
existed, people would drift towards it as the path of least resistance,
compared to finding music on P2P networks.

The problem is, the RIAA doesn't control the internet the way they control
the commercial radio airwaves, and they know that the musical tastes of the
people are broadening, and threatening their pop star system, threatening
their
profit margins. They can't keep out the competition, so they're trying hard to
control the environment in a way that's most beneficial to their corporate
interests - screw everybody else. Screw independent artists and screw the
public
at large.

I donbt know if anybody can predict these things with certainty, but it
seems
to me the basic nature of the internet will ultimately triumph over the
narrow interests of the music industry. The music industry will not cease to
exist
by any means, but it will shrink somewhat, and will have to give way to the
flourishing grassroots music scene which the internet has nurtured.

It seems to me that the most relevant question in terms of the efforts of the
RIAA is, at what cost to society at large? How far will they go to maintain
this broken system, to maintain the inequities of their star-making
machinery?

And another crucial question: Why should a system be allowed to continue that
massively rewards a few artists for their "original" records full of
"original" songs, while leaving destitute the masses of musicians and others
who
created the cultural seas in which these "original" artists swim?

Musicians, as a whole, represent some of the richest people in the society
and many of the poorest. The music industry's system, in conceptual terms and
in
practical terms, is broken. It represents the interests of the monopolies
against the interests of the rest of the world's people, cultures, musical
traditions and musical innovations.

To my fellow musicians I say put all your music up for free download, help
your careers and screw the music industry. To music fans I say keep on
downloading, don't feel bad about it - and try not to get caught.

www.davidrovics.com
drovics at gmail.com
www.myspace.com/davidrovics
www.soundclick.com/davidrovics


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