How to Slay the RIAA

mrG — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:21:38 -0500

Nothing is more dangerous than a monster who fears for its lifeline, and in these escalating cases of legal attacks, propaganda campaigns and fear tactics, you and I all know the days of the beast are numbered.

Hang on: As pitches go, this will be a long elevator ride ...

In my own industry, information technology, we know all too well how to drive an unwanted competitor out of the game: You commoditize their product. Once the lifeline is cut away, the monster can writhe and roar, but just as our heroine discovers in Nicholas Roeg's Labyrinth, the Goblin King has no power over us, we are free, and it's the Goblin King who fades away.

When I talk to my musician friends, there's a will to get their music out and be heard. When I talk to my ICT friends with their computing projects, there is this very same will to become known and to be of service to the larger economic community. Unfortunately, in both cases, their childlike vision collapses as soon as the ring comes near, and they fall back into the old ways, ways they have conditioned themselves to see as "tried and true", only, I wonder, seeing them all try and fail, just how true are these old ways.

The bands and singer/songwriters I meet invariably work at odd jobs and road gigs building up their savings to wager on the same dream: The CD. They hire the best producers they can find, book studio time, go through the sessions and the mastering and re-mastering and pinch their pennies until they can walk out of some replication shop with a box of disks.

But what happens next? They give them away. They trade with other musicians, send dozens, sometimes hundreds of these out to festival artistic directors, radio stations, programming directors, just about anyone, and sometimes it does lead to some airplay or a gig, but it's a false sense of success when the returns never do recoup the cost of that CD. The information technology people do the same, they build big websites on the finest hosting services, hire the best graphic talents, mortgage their homes and sit before a side-office filled to the brim with 'product' in shrink-wrap that will be sent out as 'promos' to every magazine editor, distributor and reviewer they can find.

It's a shot in the dark.

Chances are, neither will recoup the cost of that production run, and while the token of exchange in these disks may lead to some social networking that may lead to some work, the probabilities are not all that promising that the lacquered shrink-wrap will pay its own way, so, as humans do, when it doesn't work, they try again, getting progressively more disillusioned, making the mistake that it is somehow them themselves who are somehow 'broken', not doing it right, missing the point. They sign up for seminars, tutorials, conferences and programs all of them laying out the "tried and true" just as they have known, and it still doesn't work.

The Last CD

What if this artist promotion model is fundamentally flawed? What if the tried and true isn't?

TeledyN - How to Slay the RIAA - Comments

How to Slay the RIAA

The Last CD