Download This…

How many songs did you download last week? Are you using Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster? The music news headlines have become, on the ‘pop’ end of the scope, a virtual propaganda street brawl between artists, the recording industry, politicians, and now my cat wants to call a press conference. The RIAA has brought out their big guns and in the image of Big Brother have decided to employ their ‘Police State’ tactics to go directly into your home, handcuff you and your hard drive and slam you both into the back of the paddy wagon.

Do you think I’m kidding? The RIAA has already issued subpoenas for over 200 people using the Kazaa network for offering copyrighted music for download and who’s to stop them from hauling them off to the electric chair? I guess when your over paid lawyers can’t get a handle on things and are fighting a seemingly loosing battle, like alcohol prohibition, you simply aim your rifle into the crowd and start picking off bystanders to get your point across.

The issues that never seem to come from the talking heads on CNN and from the mouths of the spineless RIAA thugs is why illegal downloading has happened in the first place. If you want to find the source of this problem then follow the stream back to the recording industry who has sat on its enlarged, gluttonous, haunches for the past ten years getting fatter and fatter on over priced CD’s and siphoning the pockets of pre-teen women with clone after clone of the next Boy Band! Suddenly, after their long slumber, they realize they have ignored the advances of technology, the global community, and a budding new industry of digital music on demand. Because they didn’t pay attention and wallowed in their own incestuous greed the recording industry is lagging slowly behind, trying to catch up, and their poor ego’s have been bruised in the process.

But, there are success stories that can’t be ignored. Fans of ‘Live’ music have banded together with the artists themselves and continue to offer free, legal, live performance recordings for download. Furthur network is teeming with material ranging from Bluegrass, Jazz, Jam Bands, and beyond because of the expressed written consent of the artists themselves. Phish even had the foresight to open it’s own LivePhish.com which comes right off the soundboard, clean as a whistle, and into your CD-Burner.

So, the RIAA continues to play Gestapo and not offer any real solutions, which is that the recording industry needs to regroup and get their shit together before they loose even more ground.

S. Remington – Editor
PhreshWater.com
Questions or Comments: editor@phreshwater.com