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Thursday, January 29, 2004
UNDERAGE HOOKERS AT THE SUPER BOWL
So let me get this straight. The RIAA sues a 14 year old girl for downloading a few Jay-Z tunes, and then in order to pay her legal fees, she does an ad (which will air during the Super Bowl) for Pepsi, a company that happens to be sponsoring iTunes, which (not to mince words or anything, but) is a pay-to-download service which only serves to perpetuate the current openly corrupt major label model in which the artist gets about ten cents of any dollar you spend on their music?
And they only get that much if they're not currently in debt to their record labels in the first place. Which weeds out even most major label artists. So maybe Jay-Z, to use this girl's favorite example, is getting that ten cents on the dollar. Great. His fridge'll stay full of Heinekens and jello-pops or whatever he does ads for. Bully for him.
But this goes beyond fucked up and into something like legalized extortion. This girl got squeezed for three grand, and now she's out there selling herself to pay off her "debt." "This ad shows how everything has changed," says Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman. "Legal downloading is great because fans are supporting the future of creative work in America." What rot. The only creative work I see being done here is in the marketing departments and law firms, who have left the real world, where many music fans might not want to give all their personal information to some online retail service to listen to just one song, and traveled into some kind of bizarroland where one corporation's lawyers taking a few thousand dollars from a teenager and then making her sell her dignity to another corporation to pay that money back is (and I'm quoting here) "sassy" and "a wink at the download hot button."
My gripe is not necessarily with iTunes. Hey, it might work out for everyone involved. It's the fact that the RIAA and their corporate partners think this is so damned funny that they're making a snarky ad using the victims of their own litigation.
I'd rather give my music away than let these bastards take a penny from its proceeds. Which means I'm in the wrong fucking business.
(Sorry. This just chaps my haunches.)
[via downhillbattle]
3:55 PM |
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