RIAA: ‘Lawsuits Can’t be the Only Solution to Piracy’

Realizes that suing CUSTOMERS is “not the best answer” but, is it too little too late?.

In a recent conversation with TG Daily, Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA acknowledged the massive PR headaches and friction with the public that it’s large-scale years long lawsuit campaign had generated and that suing potential customers “was not the best answer.”

Oh really? You mean basically extorting college students, whom you’ve once referred to as some of your best customers, without the benefit of due process is maybe “not the answer?”

After years of suing grandmothers, disabled veterans, housewives, children, and oh yeah, even the DECEASED, it has finally dawned on somebody in the record industries ivory towers that something about it’s strategy is amiss?

You mean to tell to me that after watching physical CD retailers go extinct, and music sales plummet, somebody has finally realized that the one thing keeping the music industry in business are the music fans and that maybe angering them all by refusing to listen to their desires in terms of content delivery and pricing while simultaneously suing anyone who got out of line was probably not a good idea?

Has the RIAA finally sobered up?

“Litigation tends to generate more heat, friction, and headlines,” Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA told us. “What is the most important anti-piracy strategy is aggressive licensing and offering great legal alternatives. That is what our member companies obviously do and our job is to complement that, which is the most important thing to do to win over fans.”

Now, I don;t think anybody’s daring enough to claim that the RIAA’s about to throttle down its copyright infringement caseload anytime soon but, it could be the signal of the last gasps of a failed strategy that has done little to stem piracy and instead has compelled many to bypass and circumvent “Big Music” altogether.

“I don’t think [the litigation] has made a meaningful dent in how much piracy goes on among American young people,” John Palfrey, a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “And I think it continues to represent a signal that the recording industry is out of step with the future, and frankly out of step with the present as well [….] But it is more importantly, I think, a distraction from finding the way forward in a digital age.”

From wanting terrestrial radio and web broadcasters to pay higher royalty rates, to a crackdown on any venue, barbershops and coffeshops included, that play music without paying proper music licensing fees, the RIAA continues to try and turn back the clock to the days where it was the source of all things music and it’s pockets swelled with ever rising CD sales.

But, that was then and this is now. That was way back in the 1990’s and this is darn near 2008. Content distribution has changed altogether and music artists don’t need record labels as much as they need them.

There was an odd statement that a Universal Music exec made a while back that music artists need the record labels, and that artists just want to play music and write songs, and that a partnership with a record label lets them do that by supporting them financially while they do so.

He even went on to suggest that they deserved a cut of previously off limits sources of revenue that are where music artists actually make money. On a $16.98 USD CD for instance, the artist and the songwriter get a measly $1.99 of it, so concert revenue and merchandising is critical too their making a living.

He writes:

Up to now, record companies have provided most of the financial investment to break an artist but have not shared in the revenue created from concerts, merchandising, sponsorship, song-writing etc. once success is achieved. The record company’s piece of the pie is declining whereas all the other segments are growing so we need to adapt.

So now artists who once might’ve needed a record label to produce, record, and distribute their music, and got a lousy cut in return, are now being asked to give an even bigger cut in return for simple recording and production? Music distribution can be done by an artist himself and without the help of a music label and the record industry is starting to sense this I think.

“Artists’ compensation should increase with new music distribution methods,” said Lory R. Lybeck, an attorney in a recent file-sharing lawsuit. “They should let the music authors actually share some of the profit, which [the RIAA] has had a strong hold on in the distribution scheme for 50 years,” Lybeck continued. “There is a whole new distribution capability, and the [RIAA] guys are not needed–and they know it.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe defeat is finally in the air and the RIAA is starting to realize that the more people it angers with lawsuits, then not only will it lose potential customers it will also cause them to seek out alternative methods of acquiring music – legal and illegal – and make the RIAA further irrelevant.

When was the last time you bought a CD from a major music label? Exactly.

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