Artists make a concsious and free decision to be represented by a major label. Nobody holds a gun to their head and makes them sign the contract." And until just recently most of them had no real choice.
Don't sign with a major label or major studio and the odds of making a good living were next to zip. to further that end the major labels have a very long and well documented history of payola scam to pay radio stations, that are increasing coming under the envelop of umbrella corporations like Clear Channel to play there artists over all others, as well as price fixing schemes like region encoding. sure that's a choice when a small handful of labels or studios manage to lock on all the distribution and marketing avenue (so that you can't even really get radio airplay to get your product out there) without basically going through them.
If the system is so good, why are so many established content providers (Janis Ian, Courtney Love, Dick Dale, The Canadian Music Coalition which includes Barenaked Ladies and Avril Laveign, Trent Reznor and more) all increasingly coming more out in opposition of that model, and an increasing number of major artists are moving to independent, non-RIAA affiliated labels? (and there main reason for doing so often seems to be that they are given some measure of control over their rights) If their arguments are so correct, why do authors like Mercedes Lackey and R.A.
Salvatore (among other) put chapter of their books online and report that sales of both current and past works increase, sometimes substantially. FOr that matter, why should I buy the arguments of an industry that has almost been consistently wrong about every argument they've put forth in the past century or more (phonographs, moving pictures, cassettes, VCRs, CDs, DVDs). In fact if you read the history of the current Hollywood studios, the used and argued for the same methods to break the "monopoly" of the major motion picture houses that the are now trying to turn around and argue is "piracy" and should be totally illegal (because they happen to be the "monopoly" now and they don't want done to them what they did to others -blah I'll have to figure out where I put the link to that one should I need it).
And why should a company like Disney, for whom the vast majority of their works are derivative of other people's works, be allowed to tie up rights to works for 50, 100, even 1,000 years when if those sames rights were retroactivated to previous content holders, they'd be sued out of business within a month? Sorry, but we're going to have to ban the sales of Mickey Mouse until the proper copyright holder (or descendant) for Steamboat Willy can be found to give permission. And Hercules is going to have to be banned until we can figure out who the hell the rightful copyright holder (descendant obviously) of that work is.
And Dean Koontz should be forced to license, or be free to be sued, by whomever inherited Mary Shelly's copyright, for the Frankenstein books he's written, despite the fact those descendent have done nothing to deserve or earn that right or benefit. I've heard the arguments, I've read the histories, I've researched the positions, and I've yet to see or hear a single argument from Big Content that really holds up under scrutiny. I do, however, see a lot of double speak, obfuscation, and often outright lies in an effort to justify a position that simply has no real merit.
You're more than welcome to try (and I've been online and spent a lot of time on many "social networks" over the years so I know that if you've been on here any length of time you likely have many allies to help support your position) but if you've come across any of my other comments on other stories you'll know I have a lot of supporting facts, opinions from extremely knowledgeable experts and people in the field, stats, figures, and other resources to back up my position. Personally I'd rather not have to spend time conducting this debate for the umpteenth time, I have other things I'd prefer to be doing, but someone has to counter the disimformation of the content industry. Artists make a concsious and free decision to be represented by a major label.
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