We all listen to music wether we want to or not. Its in our homes, watching TV, driving in our car, going to the store, its unavoidable. Then why is the recording Industry trying to make people feel guilty about burning illegal CDs, when we can go to the mall and hear as much music for free as we want . I for one will never feel guilty because I always support the artist I download, by buying his/her cds or going to their concerts. The industry has always been about money instead of music. They are just mad because consumers have finally figured them out.
The first record created was in eighteen-seventy-seven. The song was Mary Had a Little Lamb. The artist/Inventor was Thomas Edison. Edison had created the worlds first phonograph, capable of playing back up to two to three minutes worth of recordings. His invention started a cultural revolution that went hand in hand with its cousin, the industrial revolution. The idea that sound could be recorded and played back at our pleasure was astonishing. I am sure no one had in mind the endless profits one could make.
Profit was a word that would be associated with music about thirteen years later, because in eighteen-ninety the jukebox was first introduced at a bar in San Francisco. In its first six months of operation the coin operated machine grossed over one- thousand dollars. It did not take a genius to realize that the United States was home to thousands of bars each capable of making equal or greater value. Thus music and money became synonymous. Singers and songwriters were no longer artists, but commodities.
Along with money comes greed and in nineteen-hundred when Thomas Lambert invented a way of mass-duplicating his patent of indestructible phonograph cylinders, and although the patent was upheld in court, costly lawsuits filed by Edison put him out of business just seven years after his invention. Records became an instant hit with the American public. People were flocking to bars to listen to recorded sound. The library of congress began recording and saving Sounds of America to preserve popular and influential music of the time, everything from bluegrass to classical.
It was no surprise that the general public soon yearned for their own way of playing records from the comfort and privacy of their homes. In 1906 a company called victor introduced a enclosed phonograph player that had been designed to look like a piece of furniture. In all, the company would spend eighty-million in advertising the machine to the world. However that is nothing compared to the hundreds of millions that goes into the advertising of new technology today.
The 1920’s brought prosperous times to America, however the advent of public radio brought a huge decrease in record player and record sales. Why would people pay for a record when they could hear the top ten on the radio? Similar to todays lawsuits against the napsters of the internet, a group of record companies tried to sue public radio for use of their records. The record sales went up eventually when they created discs that could hold more than five minutes of recorded sound. The music genre Jazz also greatly lifted the music industry and in my opinion saved the music industry.
Now that the base has been set for record label/production greed, flash forward eighty years to the present. Record Labels are just as greedy and have more control over things we see and hear. For example, Clear Channel Entertainment is the proprietor of Madison Square Garden , that owns the NY Knicks. At the games no music is played that is not on the labels that Clear Channel has invested into. The Mp3 revolution is similar to the same problems the recording industry faced with radio and the technology that later enabled us to create our own mixes on cassette tapes.
The RIAA (Recording Institute Association of America) will have you believe that numerous amounts of money go into making a CD yet in my research they never gave me a solid dollar amount. What I want to know is if they can come up with numbers for the money they lose from cd pirating why can they not even give us a definitive amount they spend on making the cd? I will tell you why. The cd costs pennies, the plastics cost 50 cents , the booklet/ Cover can cost up to a dollar. So all and all you are looking at the most, a two-dollar cd, yet they can sit there and sell it to us for twenty dollars.
The industry says that artists need to be paid, but they do not make any real profit in cd sales. Artists get approximately ten cents per cd sold. At live concerts if they want to sell their new cd, they have to buy them back from the label at normal sticker price. In other words they make the artist buy back their own music to sell it. The RIAA has some serious concerns though, according to their 2001 Mid-Year shipment reports the dollar value on shipments had decreased from 6. 2 billion to 5. 9 billion, a 4. 4 percent decrease.
Now in August of last year napster( a online music swapping program) usage had ceased, due to a court ruling and online music swapping was forced into other sites that enabled users to share music files. Interestingly enough in 1999 when napster was in full swing with users trading thousands of songs daily, the RIAA Mid-Year report showed a 6. 3 percent growth, and a 20 percent growth total from two years prior. Now I can not figure out how they can blame napster and other online pirating sites for the decrease percentage in 2001, when they had the largest percentage increase when napster was fully operational.
Nonetheless the RIAA continues to blame Cd-Piracy for the loss of money and in my opinion make burning a Cd sound like the equivalent of dealing drugs. The RIAAs website states that The RIAA confiscated 87 illegal CD-Rs during the first half of 1997, 23,858 during the first half of 1998, and 165,981 during the first half of 1999″. Maybe if they had concentrated their efforts on promoting CDs and making them more marketable, instead of going around being the big bully on the block maybe they would have noticed an increase in sales instead of an increase in online music swapping.
On another aspect of the Recording Industry the cassette value dropped 25 percent last year after a 19 percent drop the year before. The RIAA says the reason for the decline is that cars are sold complete with Cd units and sales of portable players of many different kinds continue to increase. Well you do not see the RIAA complaining about the inevitable extinction of cassette tapes and its plummeting market value that is because they know that technology is changing. That is what they need to realize about CDs.
They never will though, because while technology in music is constantly growing, consumers are learning that it is much cheaper and more efficient to download the top fifty rather than go out and buy fifty CDs. It is my feeling that music is for the people. A recording artist should be proud if his of her music is being downloaded, not concerned with the money they might be losing. Every time the RIAA shuts down a file-sharing website, two more will open in its place. They can never win this battle, so they better find a way to appeal to the masses before they are taken over by them.