An Open Letter To The Music Industry

The recent uproar over the SOPA/PIPA (and now ACTA) legislation has given me time to think about the state of the music business. Everyone knows by now that the music business has been 'suffering' since the advent of file sharing on the web, at least, if you listen to the RIAA. I am not saying anything new by trashing the RIAA. However, I do want to remind everyone that it is the 'music industry' that has manufactured artists and music through the 80's and 90's and shoved them into our face via radio, television and music stores. This is not really an open letter to the monolithic music business that churns out garbage. No, this is more a letter to the rest of the recording artists. The ones that actually try to put out a quality product. The internet has caused, what I see, a renaissance in music. Whereas it might have taken an independent label recording artist close to ten years to get a decently large fanbase, new artists can rocket ahead in just a year's time after their first release. How does this happen? Free music. Now, I am not saying that artists should give their music away for free. I am an individual who spends every spare penny I have on the music industry. I go to concerts, I buy merchandise, I buy special limited edition prints, I buy music, a lot of music. If, however, I was just limited to what I was buying, as I was twenty years ago, my musical enrichment would suffer. People like music. I love when I walk into a restaurant or store and hear some obscure band playing over their speakers and that band has had no radio time, no record label deal, no advertising. It has all happened through file sharing and the speed of communication on the internet. In just five years time Austin City Limits Music Festival has gone from selling out maybe a month or two before the festival to selling out in hours, or less. This is happening at music festivals all around the country. Not to mention small festivals (like Forecast) have grown from 200 people to 25000. Concert venues are selling out bands faster and faster. Just in our little berg of OKC, I have seen an increase in concerts coming through our city in the last five years. Record stores are experiencing a rebirth due to the recent popularity of vinyl. There is no way you can convince me that pirating music is hurting artists. The RIAA business model simply doesn't work. Music is and always has been a shared experience. I have, since I started listening to music as a teen, shared music with my friends. Recording music off the radio, making cassette tapes for my friends (with my dual cassette drive), and burning CD's. Now I can copy my entire library from one hard drive to another in the amount of time it used to take to copy a cassette. Now, I understand that the MPAA does not operate under the same principles I have laid out. Pirating of movies should stop. Movies can't go on tour and can't merchandise in quite the same way. As for the RIAA, give it up! Find a new way to make money, like so many others have. You fleeced us for years on CD's and shitty artists. So, recording artists, the only way these things stop is if you stand up and fight with us. Start your own label, join an independent one or talk to your label about it's participation in file sharing. Services like Spotify and Grooveshark and Pandora are revolutionizing music even further. Prosecuting file sharing companies, censoring content on the web, etc. is backwards thinking. We want to see forward thinking. Quit trying to take us back to the way things were. We hated that. I like being able to listen to new music at my leisure and to explore bands. As Spotify takes hold and services like Soundcloud and Grooveshark proliferate, we are able to listen to more and more and with the Spotify add-on in Facebook, we can even watch what our friends are listening to. Let me put it this way, the old way resulted in me knowing and liking a few dozen artists and spending my money to go see a few of them live and buy their merch. Now, because of services like Spotify and the ease with which I can obtain music, as well as the rise of music blogs like this one, I know and like hundreds upon hundreds of bands. I now try to cram as many live shows as I can each year trying to see these bands live and buy more merch, because they've gotten better at putting out stuff people want. Enjoy the renaissance of music with us artists. Please don't let the RIAA take us back to that dark time. It's time for change and only you can change it.