Fallout from the Internet Debacle

gatesh8r writes "This article off of Janis Ian's site lashes out at the RIAA for "wanting to control everything that the consumer will purchase" and then proposes some mild and thoughtful solutions to the problem. Nice to see an artist write up something like this." This is her follow-up to her earlier piece.

More strong artists

[TibbonZero]

Artists like Janis (who I happen to have ran into in Maryland), are just what the industry needs. If more artists weren't as concerned with making 11 million that year instead of 10 million, then we would be in alot better shape. You know what artists used to make their money off of? Touring, and making music compelling enough to buy.
I am not for stealing of music, I am the industry as a Producer/Engineer, and realize that people need to make money, but the RIAA, and MPAA are just getting out of hand. The only way that this will be solved is either
a) a Boycott on buying music, buying movies (or renting them), for a period of time (The NoBuy Winter?) or
b) The artists AND record companies and film companies (often the same thing), going against the MPAA and RIAA (most likely only the Arists would do this, as the record companies support the MPAA and RIAA most of the time)...

Berman wants r00t...not while I'm around!

[MsGeek]

Ms. Ian strikes again with a great idea. Put all the out-of-print music on an industry-built website and use micropayments for downloading! Great freakin' idea. Considering that a lot of people search P2P sites for music that is out of print or otherwise unavailable, this is great.

I found out something interesting this weekend: Representative Howard Berman is indeed my representative. (He doesn't represent me or my views but that's just my dumb luck for living in this part of the San Fernando Valley...) Anyway, he will be holding a Town Hall meeting HERE:

Thursday, August 8th, at 6pm

At Sepulveda Middle School Auditorium
At the corner of Plummer and Sepulveda.

Anyway, if anybody lives in the East San Fernando Valley, this would be the opportunity to confront Berman over his MPAA/RIAA hax0r bill.

Re:The People vs. The Music Industry

[msimm]

I had the same problem: $17 avg. cd with maybe 1 or 2 really good songs 1 or 2 so-so and 10 songs I didn't care for (back in my electronica days). Then it hit me...I didn't really like the music I was listening to..

I dumped my music selection down to just what I knew I liked and started searching for new stuff/styles.

I rediscovered 4ad Records, but now mostly I listen to indie (mp3.com [mp3.com] indieradio.org [http])..in case your curious.

And not to plug them, but emusic.com is all you can download for $9.99 a month and they actually have some good music... [emusic.com]

Re:They'll never agree to it

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget that this argument only works when the tracks are homogenous goods. How does releasing tracks for artist X effect the supply of tracks from artist Y? Or does releasing really old tracks from artist X really compete with new tracks from artist X? I think you discount novelty and popular trends too mush. It is true that they are inconvenient economically speaking but they do factor into many people's utility curves. How many people really want to listen to music but don't care who it is by? (Not counting all those boy band crazed girls... )

If the tracks are not homogenous across artists (or time) then it is possible for the record companies to proceed with this plan and still make positive economic profits. They can do this by exploiting peoples preference for particular artists.

However I still don't see this happening with the prevalence of P2P networks. Effectively forcing the recording companies to compete with a competitor with zero Marginal Cost (there are still costs, but they are associated with individual decisions to use P2P and stray from traditional Industrial Organization's concepts or market size, entry, exit......) What the Recording companies need is to offer more then what P2P can. all the Bonus materials that are bundled with DVDs come to mind. (I realize that the solution is not so simple when your medium is plain old CDs)

Just my thoughts.

Garfunkle (too lazy to create an account)

Re:Too early in the morning to be this cynical

[ethereal]

It's an open format, because there are freely available tools to read and write the format. It is not necessarily an unencumbered format, in the sense that you may have legal troubles if you try to use the format in an open manner. But the details of the format are well-known; in fact it is the legal encumbrance itself (the mp3 encoding patents) which force the format itself to be open and known.

To draw a half-hearted analogy, MP3 is open but encumbered the same way that some software is Open but not necessarily Free.