What Do You Do With 10 Copies of the “Three Tenors Greatest Hits?”

The problem with the RIAA

The RIAA has been pissed ever since the invention and acceptance of MP3. The Compact Disc format, while producing good sound, suffers from the same problems that records, 8-tracks, and tapes do. They take up room. I’ve got a pretty decent CD collection and I store it on three shelving systems worth of space. Yeah they’re not as bulky as an 8-track or cassette tape, and they’re not as big as vinyl, but they still take up a significant amount of room.

Of course the RIAA and other such industries could give a damn about this. What really upset their business model from the start is that they were not allowed to choose the next format for their product. Keep in mind that the RIAA doesn’t sell anything except sound, which is intangible and easily reproduced. As a pianist, if I don’t want to buy an album, I can listen to the song a few times and then pick it out on a keyboard. Boom! I have the song available to me at any time I want and I paid nothing for it. Something that would do the RIAA a heart attack and bring an end to their industry if you believe their BS.

But as said, each and every time a new format for storing sound came along, it was the recording industry making the decision for what to go with and for how long to go with it before looking for something new. Tell me, did you decide that records, various tape methods, or CDs were a good idea? No. The industry did. Now along comes this MP3 thing and it’s like an answer to a prayer. You can have literally have tons of music. So much music that the CDs would bend the shelves on oak bookcases. You can have the music and it’s compact, it takes no real room, if you do run out of room on your hard drive, you simply go get another one. Doing the math, an 80 gig HD would hold about 13,333 songs of decent quality. Far more than any bookshelf and with far less room. The MP3 was a consumer wonder. We, as consumers chose MP3 because we loved everything it provides. And what’s better, MP3s do not skip. You can put a song on an MP3 player and dance to it without worry about skipping, damage to your CD, or degrading sound quality. There’s nothing to break, there’s nothing to rot, nothing really deteriorates, you can’t scratch MP3s, you’ll never resurface it, etc.

Since consumers chose the next format, the RIAA’s time tested business model went to hell at the speed of light. Look how long it took for them to start playing along. Only recently could you download music legally from services like iTunes, Rhapsody, and the like. And they don’t have everything because the RIAA hasn’t allowed some songs to be converted to MP3. Even still, with services like Rhapsody, you don’t actually get an MP3 out of it. They force you into burning a CD. They say this is to prevent piracy since you’re not able to get an MP3. Really? Then why can I turn right around and rip the CD to MP3 after I burn it?

Now we come to the dumping of CDs in public libraries. Since people are no longer forced into buying an entire album, they aren’t. I mean think, how many CDs do you have where you wound up buying the disc for one or two songs? Now you can do a search, and legally or not, get your songs that you want and screw the rest of the junk. Sure people like Three Tenors, but they probably don’t want but two or three songs. Sure some folks dig Keb Mo, just like they dig Britney Spears. But when a lot of people want a Britney Spears song, they want Toxic and a couple others and to hell with the rest. Result, unsold CDs because of total quality issues. Here’s a test, in ten seconds name me five albums by five different artist where the entire album was pure listening goodness. Where you couldn’t wait for the next song and dreaded the final song on the album. Even if you’re able to do that, do it again with different artists and see if you can come up with five more.

The RIAA, like any huge conglomerate representing corporations, is out for its own good. Any time they tell you “we’re trying to protect the consumer” cover your ass. They’re trying to protect you by leveling lawsuits against their customers, by lying about piracy’s effect on dwindling sales, and by coming up with half assed encryption schemes that fail because of a Shift Key or a Sharpie.