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.
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