Will Chatham

Remem­ber the late 90’s, when the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica (RIAA), backed by meat­heads such as Lars Ulrich of Metal­lica, decided to go on a suing frenzy to stop out­fits such as Nap­ster and Kazaa from enabling peo­ple to share files with each other? (Ok, the obvi­ous answer should be “Yes, Will, I sure do!”)

Well, this is funny:
“RIAA Pock­ets File­shar­ing Set­tle­ment Money, Doesn’t Pay Artists Whose Copy­rights Were Infringed”

In case you haven’t heard, the RIAA soon turned to strong-arming con­sumers once they had extorted all they could from the file shar­ing soft­ware companies.

The fact of the mat­ter is that they are resist­ing tech­nol­ogy. Peo­ple want music in a new way. They don’t want it bogged down by Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment. They want it cheaply and eas­ily, and the tech­nol­ogy to give it to them that way — AND to pay the artists fairly — exists.

Just look at what Radio­head did last year by let­ting peo­ple decide what they wanted to pay for the album, mak­ing them an esti­mated $6 to $10 mil­lion. Or see how “Nine Inch Nails make $1.6m on free album” just this month.

Both bands turned their noses up at the record com­pa­nies and did it their own way. And it seemed to res­onate well with the fans.