Piracy news

News today that the RIAA is suing another 744 people in it's effort to combat what it calls piracy through file-sharing services.

Since last September, the RIAA has sued more than 4,000 people in its efforts to combat piracy, which the music industry has blamed for a multiyear decline in CD sales. Some music fans have countered that bad music, and not piracy, was to blame for the decline.

Of course, both sides are right, and neither is going to back off until one side stops pissing off the other. I think it's ironic though that the worst music is always the most prevalent on the file sharing services. Try to find the Avalanches remix of Belle & Sebastian's "I'm A Cuckoo" on WinMX. Ain't there. Now search for Papa Roach....yeah. See my point?

In any case, it looks like the "pirates" are winning. Artists who work at it can still sell CDs and make money via touring, which is how it should be. The Onion A.V. Club just interviewed Steve Earle, normally an insufferably self-righteous Marxist crapsack, and he seems to agree on the direction the business is taking:

I think the music business is changing. Artists that don't want to tour and just want to collect royalty checks and stay home are not going to be able to do that anymore. And the more I think about it, the more I think that's the way it should be. I feel like I owe my audience something. They feed my kids. And I really like my job, a lot. Thank God, because the reality of the business is that people have to tour now. ... But that's the way the business is going. There's no way that file-sharing and downloading aren't going to affect the bottom line. But I really believe that if I make records that are indispensable to my audience, they'll go out and spend money to buy them, even if they've already downloaded them. If they can afford it. If they can't, I'd rather they be able to download it than not get it at all.

Ok, so maybe he's not such a bad guy after all.

I don't understand The Beach Boys' theory of spiritual evolution. I don't know how you get from transcendental meditation to being a Republican.

*sigh* Never mind.