War on Radio

Covered, brilliantly (Jesse Walker is an alt radio guy himself), in Reason magazine here and Idolator here, the Performance Rights Act is a massive scam that’ll screw over hosts of musicians.

See, the idea is that radio stations should be happy, under this bogus Performance Rights Act, to pay copyright owners and the occasional performer (if you’re lucky enough to retain your copyright) extra cash for giving their music promotion and rotation.

And since this blog often covers things of an independent and punk variety, it only makes sense to talk about how this impacts indie labels. As Mr. Walker points out:

Ah, you say, but what about the independent artists who don’t get big promotional pushes from the major music labels? Surely they’d benefit from a new revenue stream? Actually, they’ll be even worse off. The economic mission of most commercial radio stations is to deliver audiences to the sponsors whose spots are aired between tunes. So programmers have a built-in preference for music whose mass appeal has already been proven. If you increase the cost of playing a record, that just intensifies the incentive: The more you pay to play a song, the more conservative you’ll be about which songs you play. The marginal cost of playing each track is the same, but the commercial payoff is greater for established artists.

Indie bands didn’t get helped by song-writer bonuses. They don’t even get airplay, realistically. Yeah, we can talk about Tegan and Sara bullshit, but actual indie bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat are not going to get much radio play. So this is yet another attempt at a giveaway to major labels and their minions. Hooray!

So I agreed to go with my father to see Phish at Red Rocks Ampitheatre on either their Saturday or Sunday show. I figured I’d dragged him to enough concerts I wanted to see that I should go to one he wanted to see!

Now, he’d been unable to get pre-sale tickets as they’d sold out too fast. So I agreed to get on Ticketmaster’s website at noon today and order the general sale tickets as soon as they were available. Well, predictably, they all sold out within ten minutes.

So, what the fuck is up with this? For instance, you could buy REM’s tickets well after they were released to general sale. Snow Patrol and such too. Granted, they don’t have the cult following of Phish, but in looking around, what’s going on is that people are buying these tickets well in advance with no intention of using them themselves. In fact, they’re buying them and then reselling them on Ebay for, literally, $1000.

I don’t understand it, really. As much as I hate hippies, for some reason I thought they’d have their act together when selling tickets and making sure that people who were actually wanting to attend got tickets. This blog that I’ve never heard of that covers local Denver news makes a good point. Nine Inch Nails makes a pretty decent effort to protect their fans from getting deprived of tickets because of some douchebag who got lucky in the Ticketmaster queue. Every time something weird comes up in the music industry, I see Trent Reznor and NIN doing something revolutionary. And as much as I can’t stand their music, at least they’re cracking down on people who are just buying tickets to resell and scam other people.

Anyway, like I said, I always had some respect for hippies because for some reason I associated them a bit with punk rock’s DIY ethic. But what I’ve suddenly hit upon is that hippies are sort of like AIG-style capitalists, whereas a lot of punk is more like DIY capitalism, with its ability to sell hundreds of thousands of cassettes and CDs without signing to a major label or selling merchandise. You get the feeling that it suddenly makes sense why Ann Coulter is a Dead Head.

Yeah, yeah, sweeping generalizations suck. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel like Phish are sort of like “sellouts” for some reason, despite my hatred of the word. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but this whole ridiculous ticket situation with Phish is just such a joke.

Once their existing lawsuits pan out (read: once the shakedowns and extortion ends), the RIAA will cease its campaign of lawsuits. Good news for those among us who pirate, right?

Maybe!

The RIAA struck up a deal with various ISPs, whereby the RIAA will report to the ISPs any filesharing activity they find and ask the ISP to warn pirates about their activity. If the pirates don’t stop, the ISPs will begin throttling the pirates’ access to the internet.

As the Mashable entry points out, this is terrible on a number of levels. I *do* think it’s better than harassing the elderly, but at the same time, private organizations cutting off people’s access to the internet without any due process is setting a terrible precedent.

Because the way the RIAA is trying to track down people, my guess is they’ll be focusing more on Limewire and Bit Torrent than they will downloaders from MP3 blogs. Thus making Google Blog Search even nicer, I guess! (And raising the question, “Why can Google provide links to MP3 blogs but Alan Ellis can’t?”)

Then there’s always the RIAA’s scout’s honor here. I mean, what’s really to stop them from setting these deals up with ISPs and then going back on their word and suing pirates again? It’s not like they’re known for their fair play. Well, they are for this FairPlay, but not for the lower case kind.

Okay, when the Beatles did that “more popular than Jesus” thing or whatever, I could sort of see that, you know? But… But, Simon Cowell?

Maybe Wayne Coyne is on to something about the British…

Oh, Pat.

I don’t even know what to say.

You gotta be livin’ in a pretty cracked out world to come up with something like this, I have to say.