Blame Games

The RIAA loves the narrative that CD sales took a precipitous drop in 1999, just as Napster came about. This blog post by Harold Feld reminds us that 1999 is also the last year the major labels were able to illegally fix prices at retail. There are dozens of reasons CD sales declined in the last decade...the RIAA scoffs at most of them and flat out ignores this one.

Needless to say, as part of the general magical thinking problem of the industry, Mr. Sherman and his fellows don’t believe the loss of their stranglehold on industry distribution and the rise of competitors (online and offline) has anything to do with their fading fortune. No, it is all that evil Napster and its wicked legacy of Internet piracy.

He Says He Says

Mike Masnick at TechDirt has a pretty intense and comprehensive line by line take down of the recent editorial by RIAA chief Cary Sherman on the opposition to SOPA/PIPA and content theft in the music industry. It's worth a read sheerly for the snark factor, but it's also a good summary of the many missteps in the war on piracy.

RIAA Totally Out Of Touch: Lashes Out At Google, Wikipedia And Everyone Who Protested SOPA/PIPA | Techdirt: The RIAA may have been a master at creating moral panics in the past, but doubling down on the same failed strategy after it's been exposed is just kind of sad. I know Sherman has been at the RIAA for ages, but it's time to get a new playbook. The moral panic strategy in which you lie, conflate different issues, and present some massive problem without any evidence is simply not credible any more.