Jesus, did any of you guys catch the pro-RIAA speech that they gave at the Grammy's? That was the most azingly horrible thing I've heard. Life or death issue? Give me a [censored] break.

-Adam

Yea i was giving that guy the bird the whole time!

The fact that you were even watching the Grammys would seem to indicate that you've already given up the fight.

I only saw it because my roommate was watching it but what a dirtbag

how about the part with the 3 people downloading 6000 songs. the idiot didn't say 6000 illegal songs just 6000 how many does mp3.com have. it's not illegal to download music off the internet just copyrighted music without permission

By the way, there's a transcript of the speech for those of us that missed it.

http://grammy.aol.com/features/speech.html

He does specifically say ``ripping is stealing [recording artists'] livelihood''. (Emphasis mine.) Idiot.

But a big congratulations to Steve Martin (and Earl Scruggs and some other folks) for winning an Instrumental Country Grammy for, you guessed it, Foggy Mountain Breakdown!

I'd like to talk about politics, but first, a little Foggy Mountain Breakdown!

ya i was luaghing.. 6000 lol they shoudl of had me there i woudl have gotten 15000 in 3 days of strait downloading.. those damn kids got paid to do that.. and u knwo they went home and downloaded more.. haha for there own music..

I actually thought that it was at least.... 1/2 right. I mean for people that WERE watching the show because they love all these recording artists... whatever, I'm not going to get into it. I think the RIAA is WAY off and WAY over-steps whatever moral ground they may have had. I hate how they lie about what the law actually is. They could have avoided all of this years ago by setting up a pay service instead of fighting mp3. To thier credit, they didn't condemn all mp3's - they encouraged people to use endoursed music sites. What's wrong with that? Nearly all artists feel the same way, but they know it is unpopular so they don't say anything. Wait, didn't I say I wasn't going to get into this...?

I say it...what a bunch of [censored]...
half of what he was saying was crap...
and 6000 songs in two days? yeah that's possible if you give three kids a dedicated T1 and let them go, but who does that? what a bull [censored] statistic...like when the RIAA first started fighting napster and they said that in Napsters first year of existence CD sales near college campuses dropped 4%...so some other company investigated and found that this was true, but CD sales in all GREW by 7% because internet sites where cutting into sales of brick and mortar but also increased the total sales...so lets see...what group of people with a large descretionary budget are also more willing to buy stuff of the internet?? College students maybe? It's this bullshit of the RIAA creating polls that make they can use to their benefit but don't really mean anything that really pisses me of about them...

I agree with you on that. I hate junk science.

I do know a LOT of people that say they havn't bought any CD's in the last year..

well...this was about two years ago...
in the last year the sales have dropped, but then again all sales have dropped with the current recession

I think he said he knows people who HAVEN'T bought CD's in the last year.

He wasn't using that old excuse that MP3s have increased record sales.

Look at the last paragraph....he refers to it as a "life and death situation". That reminds me of this article.

LOL forgot about that! Good one!

I do know a LOT of people that say they havn't bought any CD's in the last year..

The two most recent I bought, not new releases, were the Simpsons music CDs because when I did get them off the Net, the quality sucked. And I know from past threads, that is a major complaint of most of us here, the quality is just not up to snuff for us...
I ripped the CDs to put on my computer & empeg. I guess by their logic I stole from the Simpsons, eh? Well they got $30 from me for the 2 CDs, and that was 2 weeks ago. So in effect, downloading them and realizing I wanted the tunes, (with higher quality rips) made me buy the CDs. They (RIAA) can kiss my a$$...

ummm...actually I know that...
I was the one talking about cd sales increasing...
and I believe they have...they have definitly for me...
I have learned of and bought cd's from new bands i had never heard of because someone saw me downloading some songs by my favorite band and suggested a similar band, and after listening to downloads I bought the cd. Although I haven't bought cds from any retail chains in a while, I try to buy directly from band websites or cheaper outlets on the web (which kinda are chains)...

but I regress...my point was that cd sales DID increase at the same time that napster was growing, yet they have dropped along with everything else that people buy in the last year or so, so I don't think that because people haven't bought any cd's in a year does go against my statement...

Actually, hasn't Napster been down for almost a year now? Hmmmm....

-Napster gets popular, CD sales continue to grow (as they always have) during the same period...
-February 2001 ruling against Napster and they effectively get neutered....
-February 2002, RIAA guy complains at grammys about dropping CD sales last year....



HMMMMMMM.....

EXACTLY my point...thank you Tony...
I think that needs to be in the FAQ

I think another point that needs to be made is that the RIAA are shooting themselves in the foot and then blaming it on the people that made the bullit...

Your speculation is a leeetle skewed because Napster isn't the only game in town.

Calvin

but it was be far the biggest...the others have never been able to catch up with them...
and most general public people that don't know anything about mp3 will mention napster if you ask them what they do know...

I think Morpheus and all the others have MORE than filled the gap. They are behind individually, but added together - they exceed. More people being on broadband helps too.

I don't know...
I think that there is a lot of overlap in users of the others and they still haven't really gotten the public acknowledgement that napster had...it seems to me that the people using these other services are people that are web savvy enough to find them and figrue out how to use them...
I know serveral people that said they use to use napster and say it sucks that there is now place to download mp3's anymore, until I tell them where to go...
I don't know...I haven't used any of them in quite a while, been too busy, and i already have all the music I want :-)

Good article in relation to the topic in this thread...

http://money.cnn.com/2002/03/06/techinvestor/tech_investor/

- Jon

I was actually at the show. People just kinda stared at him. I started talking to my friend. Eh, the artists seemed to enjoy it.

Which show, Politically Incorrect or the Grammys?

- Jon

Grammys

How does one go about getting tickets to the Grammy's? Or are you secretly a member of the celebrity class? ;-)

Calvin

My dad works closely with one of the big sponsors of the show.