RIAA and a Dying Industry

It’s no secret that downloading has affected the industry greatly in the past decade. Everywhere you turn there’s new music out there and no one is paying for it. The idea that this is a bad thing is one I don’t agree with. Record labels are constantly struggling with the idea that they need to stop piracy and get back to fans paying for their music again. I think that the system is broke and we need to accept it. Things are never going to go back to the way they were. The Internet has made this impossible. We never going to have a huge genre wave again and no one is going to think that music shouldn’t be free.

The RIAA is one of the major organizations that are trying to hold on and keep people paying for music. In some ways what there are doing is a good thing and in others a bad. They’ve made it possible for bands to license their music out to other forms of media and this has become a huge source of revenue for artists. There are now over 400 licensing companies and the digital licensing revenue for 2009 was 3.8 billion dollars. But they are also responsible for copyright infringement acts which have really only become a nuisance. Anyone with semi-decent Internet skills can find millions of other ways to download and they do.

They also unsuccessfully brag about the streaming services they’ve helped create, which on the surface look great but really are just hurting artists. “Spotify racked up one million plays of Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face', and paid the artist just US$167 (GBP100) in royalties,” according to Gizmag.com. Lady Gaga is obviously huge and any artist who can’t pull that kind of play weight, which is most, could never dream to see a check even that big.

Luckily a lot of artists have just come to accept they aren’t going to make money from their recorded music anymore. They try,along with others, to come up with other sources of revenue to make up for the income that records can no longer bring in. A site called BandHappy.com gives fans the ability to take lessons from some of their favorite artists for a preset price by the artist. New and exciting things like this are the direction the industry needs to head.

The RIAA is a great organization that has been doing a great job in the industry for years but it needs to adapt to the times. The ideals of the company and the music world need to take a hard look at the future and make the changes necessary to keep artists alive and fans interesting in contributing. 

This is Broken

I watched a speech by Seth Godin last night called “This is Broken.” The point of the video was him talking about how and why things are done incorrectly and not fixed. This is an idea I think about everyday. I am constantly running into things in my life that don’t work and there’s no reason they should be like this.

Mr. Godin is certainly no the best speaker I’ve ever seen but he’s relatable and that seems to be his strong point. He comes off like someone you know and stays that way throughout his speech. Often times I see speeches, especially on TED, from “gods among men” and they are difficult to relate with. Their intellects are staggering and their resumes are endless. But back to his topic.

In his speech he identifies a base seven reasons for why these things are created. These seven things are: Not my job, Selfish jerks, The world changed, I didn’t know, I’m not a fish, Contradictions, and Broken on purpose. Now the most glaringly apparent in everyday life are not my job, selfish, and I’m not a fish, which is personally my favorite and a serious oversight in most designs.

Without going through all the examples and essentially restating his speech, I’ll go through the important ones. Not my job is obvious in that if something doesn’t work well or is broken, if it’s not your job, who cares. Selfish is another easy one because everybody is familiar with using things that work horrendously just because it’s better for someone else. The, I’m not a fish isn’t so direct and basically means whoever designed it was not the intended market of the product. They never had to use it and therefore, never saw it’s flaws. This seems like something that should never be overlooked in the design phase, but apparently only a select few designers feel this way.

Now these all are horrendous reasons to ever make something work terribly, but it happens constantly. Personally if nothing else, Mr. Godin’s speech makes me feel like this kind of thought process should be present in the creation of anything. I should never put my name on anything without going through all the ways my product could be used, looked at, or judged and make sure on every level it makes sense. Releasing products that make anyone question its purpose or design is unacceptable, ever.