Zack Rippy

In case you live under a rock, the RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America.

If you didn’t know, they like to sue people. A lot. In fact, that seems to be their favorite pastime these days.

Don’t get me wrong – I am a fan of copyright protections. I know they protect artists and the revenue allows them to create more music, etc. I understand that. I buy music that I really like. In fact, I just bought a CD from this band that is local to Baltimore called The Bridge. I highly recommend checking them out.

Anyways, back to the RIAA and their seemingly limitless ability to be completely lame and attack all things awesome.

Their latest victim is a great little site called muxtape.com. Muxtape.com allows(ed?) you to upload several mp3′s and then it would stream them back to visitors of your site. Nobody could download the files you uploaded, but it was a great way to create random mixes to share with friends. We all made mixtapes back in the day and muxtape.com is a sort of Web 2.0 (I hate that term) equivalent.

The RIAA apparently had a problem with the site. I don’t know what it is. Their page simply reads:

Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.

I assume the RIAA‘s problem is something along the lines of: “People are enjoying music and we are not directly profiting nor did we give permission.”

See, the interesting thing is this – I found The Bridge through someone else’s Muxtape page. I bought their CD. I have recommended them to at least five different people since I bought their CD Saturday and I know for a fact that two of those people have also bought their latest CD. That is three CD sales as a direct result of muxtape.

You see, RIAA lawyers, your attacks on harmless sites like muxtape do nothing but prevent people from discovering new music or frustrate them into turning to piracy. Seriously.

I’d never recommend people illegally download music, but people do. All the time. Perhaps the RIAA should spend more time developing new and innovative ways of getting their music into the hands of music lovers and less time standing in the way of technological advances and suing people for finding creative ways to listen.

Music lovers will buy good music. Just don’t prevent us from enjoying it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Commentary, Media, Music, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.