Good ol money grubbing recording industry

Back in the day I used to literally buy an average of a new cd per week, sometimes 2. At one point, soon after college, my cd collection had grown to nearly 300 cds. Now days I might buy one a month and probably not even that often. Part of the reason for that is that I am more picky about what cd's I purchase since so many of them have one or two good songs and the rest are just filler. But the majority of the reason I have curtailed my cd purchases is because of the actions of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and their quest to sue everyone on planet Earth who has ever downloaded, thought of downloading or known anyone who has ever downloaded music off the internet. I will grant that the recording industry does lose money from this, as there are people who will download a whole cd instead of buying one. But, even though I don't have exact stats here to back me up, I think most people fall in the category of dowloading a song here and a song there that they like.

If you have not heard, the RIAA is trying to track down those that download and upload music to the internet and then they subpeona the records from that persons ISP (Internet Service Provider) to find out who that person is so that they can sue them. For someone that downloads several hundred songs a year, I don't so much have a big problem with them being used. But that is not the only people they are after. I have seen them sue someone who has downloaded two or three dozen songs.

But here is my favorite part: The RIAA, in their infinite wisdom, automatically assumes that anyone who downloads a song would otherwise have paid full price for it, an assumption that is ludicrous. The reality is that I might download a single song because I don't feel like shelling out $15 for an album that sucks ass other than that one song. I think we all can name a few albums that we have purchased because of one song we have heard that was good, then we get the cd home and the rest of it sucks. So my challenge to the RIAA and the record labels is to quit putting out crap and maybe more people will buy albums.

If there is a group that I really like, I am going to buy the cd if I am big fan. You get not only the music, but the lyrics, notes, artwork, etc and those things are important to some serious fans. I also think that the music labels are partly to blame for not having the sense to get in on downloaded music early on. If it weren't for Napster, would the song download sites be anywhere near as popular or would they even be there at all? At least napster showed them how popular it was, and now there are several sites where you can download single songs for less than a buck. Yeah its not as much profit as someone buying a cd for $15 for that one song, so the record company does lose some potentail profit there, but they need to be smart and get that to work in their favor. Maybe go back to offering a good bonus track on the cd to entice people to buy it, much like they did in the early days of cds to get people to buy the cd version.

In case you aren't aware how big of money grubbers these people are, consider that many years ago, they tried to get a law passed that would pay them royalties off of every blank audio cassette sold to make up for what they claimed they lost from people dubbing cd's to tape. As I recall the recording industry used the same arugments then that they are using now, and they make no more sense now than they did then.

Okay, end of rant, have to go download some music.