Via PopMatters and TechDirt I was led what looks like an older page on the RIAA’s website which posits that we have actually been underpaying for CDs for the last decade. Apparently, by their math, we should have been paying $33.96 for a CD in 1996. Hee. Imagine the downloading if that was the case. The internets would have been shut down from the traffic by 1998.
The page also contains this supposedly guilt-inducing gem:
The creative ability of these artists to produce the music we love, combined with the time and energy they spend throughout that process is in itself priceless. But while the creative process is priceless, it must be compensated. But while the creative process is priceless, it must be compensated.
Translation: art is priceless, but we can put a price on it. So remember that beautiful, poetic thing that we just wrote about the whole pricelessness of the creative process? Don’t.
But I digress. My subject was the RIAA’s assertion that CD prices have been a total and utter bargain for lo, these many years. And while I will leave it to people much smarter to me to point out why the RIAA’s logic is so terribly wrong, it got me to wondering: what else does the RIAA want you to believe?
So I did some more digging around, and eventually I found this:
The Top Ten Other Things That The RIAA Wants You To Believe
- 10. The producers of Lost have a master plan and aren’t just making it up as they go along.
- 09. Barry Bonds never took steroids.
- 08. We will learn something from the Scooter Libby trial that we didn’t already pretty much suspect anyway.
- 07. You can cure homosexuality, racism, serial womanizing, homophobia or just about anything by going into rehab!
- 06. Steve Jobs would rather see music freed from DRM than locked into an iPod.
- 05. Anna Nicole Smith’s death was a tragedy.
- 04. Not only is Fox News fair and balanced, Air America was a damn good idea.
- 03. Two words: Zune rules!
- 02. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip holds a candle to West Wing or Sports Night.
- 01. If CDs were supposed to be priced at US$33.96 in 1996, by now they would be underpriced at $54.95, so pay up, you music-loving bastards!!
And the Number One Other Thing The RIAA Wants You To Believe:
Remember back in 2000 when that N’ Sync album sold 2,400,000 copies in its first week? Good times. But let’s do the math and figure out how much money that Jive records lost because they sold those albums for $20 less than they should have!
Let’s see: I come up with $48,000,000. Forty-Eight Million Dollars. On a single album. In a single week. That’s a lot of money. If even some of that had filtered back to N’Sync (after all, I’m sure that their contract was totally fair)(because that’s just how the Major Labels roll), then that Justin Timberlake would have been able to sustain his career since that time.
So let’s multiply that out by all of the CDs ever released at the artificially lower prices. Let’s say that we started ripping the RIAA off with the low prices in, say, 1990. Hang on . . . carry the 2 . . .
Wow! Without even figuring downloading, it turns out that by not paying the correct amount of money for CDs all of these years, we consumers owe the RIAA $989,090,694,935,991,845,243.45!!
No wonder they hate us so much!