What does the Bush administration and the US recording industry have in common? Both seem bent on fighting a war with a losing strategy.
The Recording Industry Association of America’s losing battle is, of course, the ongoing question of downloading music from file sharing programs such as Gnutella and Limewire. The latest episode in this fight hits fairly close to home – 20 Vanderbilt University students, as well as other Tennessee college students, were accused of illegally downloading material and charged hefty fines of several thousand dollars. The bill could have been even higher – one student, University of Tennessee sophomore Chelsea Conn, could have faced a fine of $1 million, if she hadn’t settled out of court with the RIAA.
The RIAA’s penalties cannot legitimately be thought of as a way to recoup the financial damage done by illegal downloading, especially since studies have shown that the ‘damage’ being done is negligible. In an analysis released in March 2004, two researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill concluded that even with billions of music downloads occurring every week, the impact this has on the recording industry’s profits cannot account for more than a minuscule fraction of losses suffered by the music industry.
In fact, the real criminal in all of this remains the business itself, which essentially commits grand theft against artists – especially new artists – every time a contract is signed. Labels will dig in to get a share of the money in clause, and musicians need to sacrifice goats and dance naked under the full moon at Stonehenge – or, at least, buy an incredible lawyer – to get the label to budge even a few percentage points. The result is that artists often see a tenth, if that much, of the income from record sales.
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Well we all know this fact allready but the question is When are the artists going to strike back? Some of them have big bucks
and can deal a good blow to the Labels… They need to join together like the P2P community does….