Situation Description taken from: http://www.boycott-riaa.com/why
Why Should I Boycott the RIAA?
Simple, many of us are tired of being ripped off by the music industry. We're tired of seeing musicians being ripped off by the music industry. We're tired of seeing our culture locked up by backroom deals and underhanded tricks.
So many excellent artists that aren't signed by labels, and they struggle everyday just to play their music and survive, all at the same time. The RIAA is a professional lobby organization of recording labels of which five labels control 90% of the music distributed in the US. In 1999 these so called "protectors" of the music industry and musicians released only 2600 CDs. In the first 4 months of 2000 Napster signed 17,000 new artists. There are over 145,000 on MP3.Com. Excellent artists are being ignored, and discouraged by the music industry. In short, We're forced to use various online services if we want to hear new music or artists, or listen to a song that's not offered for sale by the labels any more. And the best part is it's easy. No jumping through hoops to download a song, no outrageous costs per song, and most of all we control what we listen to, not the riaa or labels. To be able to save paid for files to harddrive, transfer them to an Mp3 player, or write them to CDR should be our prerogative, not that of the labels'.
About 80% of the music in the labels catalogs is not available at any given point. Napster changed that, that is the primary reason for the success and popularity of Napster. It's been a given since day one that Napster would eventually have to charge for it's services. Even Karen Allen on the RIAA mentioned this to me as early as last July (2000) when I was contacted about this site. Yes, the RIAA contacted me within one week of putting up the website, wanting a meeting. We settled for a phone conversation.
Our comment to the "Big 5" is you made your bed, now lie in it.
ALL ITEMS IN THIS SECTION are for the purposes of making people aware of the RIAA Menace and what can be done about it. You might also wish to visit Boycott-RIAA.com's Online Store here: http://www.boycott-riaa.com/products
