As discussed yesterday, it’s not for the RIAA to sit on their pedestal and rage about people getting laid off, session musicians not getting paid, and songwriters suffering because of illegal file-sharing. We know this is happening, but righteously suing people is not the solution to anyone’s problems – and I say that as a songwriter as much as a music fan who occasionally downloads music for free from places I perhaps shouldn’t. The world has changed, and you have to adapt if you love music, because music isn’t going away, and neither is people’s desire to hear it.

The RIAA and the major record labels are just pissed off because they can no longer control the situation like they used to – and pretty soon they won’t even be able to control the price (which will be nothing, obviously). It’s a difficult situation, it’s undoubtedly a shame for the people making a living from the spreadsheet and the calculator – but petty revenge is not the way to go about making yourself feel better.

Oh, but “It isn’t being done on a punitive basis” says the lovely Mitch, CEO of the RIAA, of the 20,000 lawsuits he’s filed since 2003. He’s just trying to scare people away from the Limewires of the cyber world, you see. But after 4 years of these supposedly ‘non-punitive’ and highly dubious lawsuits, what effect have they had? Well, according to Rolling Stone there’s been “a 4.4 percent increase in the number of peer-to-peer users in 2006, with about a billion tracks downloaded illegally per month, according to research group BigChampagne.” For the new generation, the concept of paying for recorded music is utterly anachronistic.

All in all, it’s a hopeless situation for the RIAA, and the more they work against the tide of free music, the more enemies they’ll make and the more people they’ll turn on to illegal file-sharing. The whole paradigm is shifting, and their message is wrong. Not only wrong, but driven by a view of the situation that seems to lack any perspective – do they really think that by suing a bunch of 14 year old kids they’re going to somehow reverse the tide and everything’s going to go back to how it was at the end of the ‘90s?

Ladytron – Nothing to Hide

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