One thing that has been exposed about the RIAA is their obscene profit margins based on the old model and that their signed-artists get only a few pennies royalties from every CD sold and the rest goes to the major labels.

One thing that is a fact about RIAA is that they do believe ALL consumers are potential thieves when given the chance to acquire music for free by any convenient means. And I think they were right. But that doesn’t excuse RIAA’s approach to punish the consumers with lawsuits.

Let’s face it …. a lot of people do want free media (and the majority have done so) from the internet without paying a dime for the content. Artists do summer. Internet has in fact dented music sales from record stores due to the majority of people out there who download and not pay for music tracks although only few of them actually pay for legit download-tracks and CD’s (for example avid music collectors).

The internet is still new unregulated and has exposed all sorts of new realities such as: (1) the ability for the mainstream public to access and download free music (and other copy-righted media); (2) changing global consumer behavior in general; (3) consumers can be thieves; (4) making the old music business model archaic; (5) exposing RIAA’s long-time control of consumers; (6) exposing RIAA’s unfair contracts with their signed artists who get only few pennies from music sales while RIAA pockets the rest; (7) the artists were ripped off by RIAA’s traditional business model; (8) artists are also not getting their deserved income from the internet (PSP sharing free downloads etc) because the majority of the downloaders are not paying anything (stealing); (9) although iTunes is the first to succeed in sales download-sales of music but apple gets to keep a huge portion of every sale the major labels keep the rest and the artists still gets next to nothing (hence it is still the major corporations who get to keep all monies from sales); and finally (9) there’s still room to experiment and come up with all different kinds of new business models in music sales especially on the internet as well in regards to ever-changing new market trends. The list can go on.

In regards to metallica’s changed point of view on downloads ….. well they were right about what they did back in 2000. What they saw was the demise of music sales in the future. A lot of people did jump on the chance to download hundreds or thousands of music tracks for free. There is no denying that there are people out there who do not want to admit that the only reason they support p2p is to get free music and movies. However that does not mean p2p and file-sharing (in general) should be stopped.

It’s just a matter of adaptation.

“Artists do summer” …. should be “Artists do SUFFER”.

i’ve had few glasses of whisky tonight