To say the RIAA is out of touch goes beyond obvious...what is more obvious than obvious?
Greg Sandoval of CNET wrote an interesting article about the fact that 6 months after announcing it was working with the top ISPs, the RIAA has yet to have any concrete deals. Now I cannot speculate as to why the telecoms have not officially crafted a deal with the RIAA, but I can hope that they have realized what I have long believed to be true...
...that top down, blanket administration of content rights is a waste of time and resources. I am sure Sisyphus would agree.
I have 2 core problems with the RIAA's attempts in this regard.
First, they do not represent the majority of artists, just the major labels. While the RIAA may tryp paint a picture of working for the "music industry" they are only working for a few companies whose business models are in flux at best, failing at worst. Now there is nothing inherently wrong for defending those who are a part of your trade group, but I believe it is difficult to bring in the help of companies like ISPs whose responsibility stretches to a much wider cut of the public.
The irony cuts even further when you think of the multitude of non-major label artists who depend on the ISPs to create the connections with fans that drive their business. And that brings me to my second point...
The best path for artists is not to dictate a top-down mechanism, which is always going to be limited in scope versus the wide and increasing number of fragmented media outlets that exist and will emerge in the future, but to support a mechanism that gives content creators complete visibility into the use of their content.
With visibility into activity and the ability to both discover and interact with those who use your content comes choice on the part of the creator to determine the business model that works best for them. Each outlet (traditional media, web, mobile, P2P) and all of their subsets brings the artist a different community with a different belief in how to consume content.
Some may want to buy songs, some may want to remix, others interact with the artist..etc, etc. The fact is with each new community comes a new opportunity to extend the reach of your content and, most importantly, an ability to leverage the relationship to earn a living.
The key is that the choice remain with the artist, not some antiquated industry group who represents a small fraction of the industry.
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