The RIAA is still cracking down amidst layoffs
The RIAA has now announced Jennifer Pariser, former Sony BMG lawyer, as the Senior Vice President of Litigation and legal affairs for the music industry trade group. Will this solve anything in regards to the RIAA’s stubborn attitude towards music consumption? To be frank, the RIAA and the major record labels are not listening to what music lovers have to say, and they certainly aren’t interested in giving them what they want.
A little while back, recently, we posted a blog entry about the Isle of Man, which is an Island not to far from Ireland. This Island has started to put a tax on the consumers Internet. This tax money is then distributed between record labels accordingly. But of course this is just an experiment, another attempt to avoid giving music lovers music on their terms…
Is it logical for the rest of the world to follow suit? Especially in America, clearly there is something wrong here. The creator of Kazaa was fined 200,000$ for violating the distribution right, and for what, helping people do a better job promoting music than the record labels are?
Not only is suing the distributors costly, but its proven ineffective, this is why DRM has been dropped for the most part on digital music. Another dangerous individual to the freedom of music is Thomas Perrelli. He single handedly convinced the Copyright Board to help kill web radio by instilling massive fees for broadcast royalties! This has forced web radio companies to beg their listeners for donations just to stay afloat.
Then there is Neil MacBride, VP and Anti Piracy for Business Software Alliance.
It’s almost as if major record labels are begging fans to stop listening, to stop caring. The big record labels are pushing the fans farther and farther away.
The only way they can stop this downward spiral is to simply give in to what’s inevitable, and give customers what they want or risk becoming irrelevant and insignificant.
People are listening to and finding out about music in different ways than they used to and music companies and content creators should understand this and act accordingly.
Tags: drm, Jennifer Pariser, Kazaa, music consumption, Record Label, RIAA, web radio