“Don’t download that song, you’re stealing money from the hardworking artist,” the recording industry cried out as they rushed from the corner offices of their million-dollar high-rise buildings into the streets, armed with only threatening letters and piles of money to waste on lawsuits.
Flush with cash and mad with the desire to protect their archaic business plan at all costs, they sued the pants of file-sharing services like Napster, KaZaa, and Bolt, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement fees and monetary awards in the process. “It’s for our artists,” they claimed. “We just want them to get their fair share.” Ironically (and unsurprisingly), those champions of the starving artist are now stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the people they pretended to champion in the name of litigiousness.
If you’re surprised that the record industry is keeping as much of this money as possible, you’ve obviously not investigated the issue and the shady practices of the record industry. This is an industry where a multi-platinum recording artist can file bankruptcy while, at the same time, their album is at the top of the sales charts (as what happened to TLC in 1995). This is an industry where an album has to sell a million copies to even scrape even, let alone make the artist spare change, because of bloated production costs and too many fingers in the pie.
Now to get their fair share, it looks as though recording artists might have to sue their companies yet again, continuing the back and forth exchange of lawsuits that explains why I haven’t bought a brand new CD for in 5 years. If this industry really needed my money, they wouldn’t be able to afford such expensive lawyers. Thank you, Internet, for making the purchase of used lower-priced CDs so easy!
Tags: riaa, lawsuits, napster, file sharing, kazaa, copyright law, music
