Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Good article about Billy Corgan doing the bidding of his RIAA slave masters

Good article in "Swan Fungus" about Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, the RIAA's dancing monkey:

The Great Pumpkin Goes To Congress

Hey, I just remembered something I learned in college! Wild, right?

My 20th Century Media course taught me all about “synergy.” When corporations try to consolidate their power in a given industry by merging or acquiring other corporations, they hope to benefit financially by controlling the 13 power roles that make up a given form of mass media. For example, when Sumner Redstone and Viacom owned Blockbuster Inc., Viacom controlled the producer and distributor/exhibitor roles, and the consolidation of power benefited the company financially because stores could stock more Viacom-related films (Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, MTV Films, et al.). It behooves any major corporation to try to achieve synergy. Of course, it also behooves intelligent members of the public to fight against synergy. Generally speaking, synergy is horrible for consumers because it leads to market saturation and less choices. There are absolutely no benefits for consumers when it comes to corporate synergy.

…Which is why I am completely unsurprised to read that Billy Corgan — the frowning prince — has sent a letter to several members of Congress saying that the potential Ticketmaster / Live Nation merger is a good idea.
Complete article

Commentary & discussion:

p2pnet.net





Keywords: lawyer digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

5 comments:

Alter_Fritz said...

Ray quoted the beginning of the article and I was wondering what the ticketmaster had to do with the guys that are regularly the topic of this blog.
Only a few paragraphs down the article it starts about the criminals:
In more bald Pumpkin-related news, Billy boy went before Congress last week along with RIAA chairmen and CEO Mitch Bainwol as part of the hearing on the Performance Rights Act. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a proposed law that would require radio stations to pay royalties to the musicians who play on the songs they broadcast. America is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t already do this, but of course that never seemed to matter until the dinosaurs working for the RIAA completely fucked up the music industry. So that makes two instances already this month in which the Great Pumpkin has aligned himself with villains and criminals. One would think that it would be easy enough to stand in opposition against a a group of people who sue 10 year-old and 13-year old girls. But sweet, innocent mongoloid Billy Corgan can be coerced into anything, apparently. It mattered not that he was aligning himself with an organization facing RICO charges, charges of overt unlawful acts and collusion charges, or that the RIAA was withholding $400 million dollars in settlement money from its artists, Corgan was still willing to go before Congress to defend them. What an amiable dumb piece of shit that guy is.

raybeckerman said...

I tried not to quote too much, because I want people to go over to Swan Fungus and read the whole article.

The Ticketmaster part of the story is really just another version of the RIAA part of the story.

The guy is a whore, motivated only by self interest.

Why anyone would believe anything he says is beyond me. (Actually probably no one does.)

Anonymous said...

Mitch Bainwol is flat out lying when he says that half the license revenue will go to artists “regardless of any other contracts.”

The current language of the bill before Congress guarantees the 50% for artists only if the broadcaster agrees to the statutory license rates and do not attempt to negotiate a lower overall rate. If they negotiate a lower rate, ALL the money goes to the label and they get to pay the artist “according to their contracts.”

Do you think ClearChannel is not going to look to reduce it’s overall royalty obligation by negotiating a lower rate, say at 75% of the statutory rate?

Do you think the labels aren’t going to agree to that 75% rate when they get to keep almost all that money, rather than just the 50% of the full statutory rate?

The only ones screwed by this arrangement are the artists. Billy Corgan has betrayed all artists by speaking up for this scam.

raybeckerman said...

General rule:

The opposite of anything said by an RIAA spokesman = The Truth.

Anonymous said...

Who cares? Smashing Pumpkins made good music 10 years ago, but now not so much.

- JJ