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Monday 14 October 2002

RIAA propaganda hits the UK [lurks]

Sitting on a beanbag in my lounge I was catching channel 4 news on the tele. It had a huge peice about how CD sales are down. Naturally the fault of music piracy on the web, according to them. It didn't even try to be objective. Everything was basically RIAA propaganda, no further exploration of the issues why the sales are down were explored.

They got some record company wanker to say straight to the camera that this was going to mean no one makes music any more. Uh huh. It was low-brow idiotic, poorly resourced and totally unbalanced shovelware journalism.

I thought we were a little bit about that sort of thing in the UK but apparently not. It even assumed everyone who did this music piracy was 16 years old (said as much!) and finished on a condecending plea not to put the poor record companies out of business. I feel sick.

I'm not saying that P2P piracy isn't worth being covered and after my red mist has cleared, I will admit that that what was good was how they equated the attitude about P2P piracy fairly correctly. Difficult for people to see a crime against rich record companies and so on. However the prevalent tone and attitude of it was just so hideously wrong. No balance, no real attempt to quote any sources on how much P2P piracy contributes to the lowering of CD sales (although they did mention the economic downturn and DVDs as other factors).

What amazes me most is the insistance of clueless technophobe wankers, responsibile for 'researching' this shit, that it's all kids that are doing it. The same sort of wankers that reckoned it was only kids that played computer games for the longest time.

7 comments:

  1. I bought a Sakira (?) cd for a friend..honest it was!!! It had a little tag in the corner saying will not play on pc or mac. Now I haven't tried it yet...but I haven't seen many other cd's with this tag on. Anyone else? Shouldv'e tried it I guess. Do they play?

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  2. It's probably one of those CDs with a corrupt/fake data track at the start, to stop the PC mounting it correctly. Easy to get around I believe, but not by Jimmy the 16 year old trying to cog his mates Slipknot CD one would assume.

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  3. Its really quite simple really. You can do it with a 99p marker or a pieceof non-clear sticky tape.

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  4. What the fuck is this, Blue fucking Peter?

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  5. It amuses me that one of the latest advertising taglines for BT Broadband is the ability to "Download your favorite artists music 10x faster".. I can't belive they're refering to the *cough* many artist 'samples' dotted around the interweb..

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  6. Well yeah, ironically downloading music is one of the closest things that broadband has to being a killer application. So broadband providers sell it up. The reality of it is that actually it's not something that's particularly practical unless you fancy being a pirate.

    Except for streaming radio, I guess.

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