Tag Archives: Hilary Rosen

Kindler, gentler RIAA

Hilary Rosen has stepped down as head of the RIAA, to be replaced by (Republican) Bill Frist’s right-hand-man Mitch Bainwol. Will this lead to a kinder, gentler approach by the RIAA? Will they try enticing people to buy downloadable music, rather than suing 60 year old grandfathers for hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Well, to get the likely answer to that question, consider that Bill Frist was a medical student at Harvard. He found himself running out of lab animals, so he used to visit the local shelters, adopt cats as “pets”, take them home, and then carry out experiments on them. How do we know this? He admitted it in his autobiography… He says he used to treat them as pets “for a few days” before “carting them off to the lab to die”.

I guess we’re lucky he became a Republican. Most people who start out dissecting pets go on to become serial killers…

So that’s the kind of guy Mitch Bainwol likes to work with. As to Bainwol himself, he was director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee… but before that he was managing director of Clark & Weinstock, a lobbying firm, so he’s gone from lobbyist to Senate to lobbyist via the bi-directional revolving door in under a year. He was also involved in taking Microsoft’s side in the anti-trust trial, and was a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, who successfully persuaded the Republicans to block increased medicare coverage for the elderly. I guess grandpa will need to hand over his retirement fund one way or the other.

CD pricing

After a day of working from home, I had to get out of the computer room. I went to Harvard Square in search of a 2x mono 3.5mm jack to 1x stereo 3.5mm plug converter. I found one at Radio Shack, but it’s a blocky thing that won’t plug directly into the camcorder, so I need to either find a really short 3.5mm stereo headphone extension cable, or wire up my own converter.

Then I saw that HMV had reached the “40% off everything” stage of their “going out of business” sale. That took their overpriced $18.99 CDs to under my $12 limit, so I cleared out what was left of the Plaid, Komputer and Boards of Canada sections. The place was packed full of people, and the shelves are pretty empty of anything desirable at this point. (Off the top of my head: there’s no Pink Floyd, three Zappa CDs, no Autechre, most of the good Squarepusher has gone, no mu-Ziq, and now no Plaid or Boards of Canada either. Every Stanley Kubrick DVD is gone, ditto Terry Gilliam. Most of the Criterion Collection discs are gone.)

You know, every time a store has an actual sale with reasonable prices, I end up spending a ton of money. The rest of the time I buy nothing. I keep hoping that one day someone at the big media corporations will take a look at the sales figures and work out what’s going on. “Gee, if we cut the price of the CDs to $10-12, we sell five times as many, and if we cut the price to $8 we sell ten times as many.”

This HMV closedown is a pretty clear indication that it’s not just me, either. The Classical section was almost empty; 80% or more of the stock was gone. All they had to do was cut it to a reasonable price and it flew off the shelves. Cut the profit margin in half and sell ten times as many, and you make five times as much money. What is it with the record industry that they can’t see this? It makes me want to bang my head against a wall in frustration. Or even better, bang Hilary Rosen’s head against a wall…

I’ve bought a handful of tracks from the Apple Music Store. I’ve concluded that it does make sense, for a very limited purpose: buying one-off tracks where I would never buy anything else from the artist in question. For instance, I bought “Journey of the Sorcerer” by Eagles, because a quick audition told me there was nothing else I’d ever want to listen to on that album. (Or any of their others, as far as I could tell.)

Generally, though, I listen to entire albums, and the iTunes store just doesn’t make sense for albums. The quality’s too low, the restrictions are too annoying, and the price is too high. But spending 99 cents to get “Journey of the Sorcerer” instead of $12, that makes sense. Now, if only they’ll add the one interesting Andrew Lloyd Webber track (it’s about 3 minutes long), the one good track on Peter Baumann’s “Romance ’76”, and so on…

HMV coda

They still have shitloads of Yanni, however. Nothing’ll make that stuff shift.

iPod thought

I’d really like an iPod. Apple are now selling them laser-engraved with the message of your choice.

Do you think they’d sell me one engraved “Fuck you, Hilary Rosen”?