Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

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In 2009 I dated an actress (musical theatre) who was being approached by the recording industry to do an album. So I went to a lot of parties with Music execs and I'll tell you what they told me.

Their strategy IS to be the bad guy.

Ask any record exec over 35 and they'll tell you people have always hated record companies. Heck, the artists themselves bad mouth the record companies and always have (James Taylor wrote a whole song bashing record execs in the 70s: http://tinyurl.com/49greg6).

So the strategy is to use that. Let iTunes, Pandora, Mog and the rest be the good guys. While the recording industry uses the RIAA to punish anyone who dares pirate with fees outrageous enough to make $10 a month seem like a gift.

One thing record execs realize that most of the general public doesn't: They have an unregulated monopoly. For example the law treats hiphop music like it's all one product and so it's held to the law in that way. As long as there are multiple hiphop record labels there's no anti-trust issues. But that's B#llS#it. If you love Eminem than you want his music and that only comes from one label. And if that label can force you not to pirate than they'll get your money no matter how much you hate them.

Monopoly over what, exactly? A lot of my favorite music is not under the purview of the RIAA.

I'm not sure what Tom was referring to, but for example, SoundExchange (an RIAA spinoff) "is designated by the Librarian of Congress as the sole organization authorized to collect royalties paid by services making ephemeral phonorecords or digital audio transmissions of sound recordings, or both, under the statutory licenses set forth in 17 U.S.C. § 112 and 17 U.S.C. § 114"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange

I think he means a monopoly over the output of any given artist, under the traditional system where artists sign restrictive multi-album contracts.

Okay, then that's not a monopoly, it's merely an onerous contract.

Copyright is the monopoly here. It's an exclusive right to control the distribution of a particular work. The onerous contract is what transfers the monopoly from the artist to the record company.

The problem is the cumulative power that the big four record companies wield, due to the sheer amount of rights they control. It allows then to arbitrarily dictate prices and conditions, because if you don't accept their terms, they can lock you out from their entire catalog. Since they have exclusive rights, no one can start a competing service with more favorable terms or a more economical business model. Which is why these four even have the ability to try to keep their pre-digital business model. If there was any real competition here (not saying I have an answer to how that would work), these companies would have been ground into dust ten years ago. Instead they have manage to either litigate away or drown in fees, any possible successor to their antiquated way of distributing music.

There are of course independent labels, free music, creative commons and so on, but that's competing distribution models for the artist, and offers no possibility for the consumer to "vote with his money". The only choice is to get a different album/song from a different artist, which doesn't make much sense to me. If I want to listen to "The Chronic" by Dr. Dre, I might also want to listen to "Illmatic" by Nas, but they're not interchangeable competing goods in a free market.

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