I first started following Slashdot back in 1997, right around the time pop music was popping up on file servers across the US in college dorm rooms for thousands of audiophiles to download illegally. Sure. And ever since then the RIAA has appeared in many a topic and been the subject of many debates over on Slashdot for any and every step they’ve taken to combat/thwart such activities online. Even in 2009, the RIAA continues to crawl the web looking for folks to fight, and they continue to show up in Slashdot conversations, which would almost be fine, except nothing has changed. When it comes to talking about the RIAA, we’ve been having the same conversations for twelve years. Why?
Of course we have to talk about it on Slashdot because the RIAA continues to make decisions that a lot of folks want to complain about, at least those of us who know the actions are taking place. Which many of us probably wouldn’t know if we weren’t reading Slashdot, and I can guess with certainty that it’s why I stopped reading daily for a couple years. (It’s in my feed reader now.)
I’m not really interested in collecting music because I can’t be bothered to make time for it, and I have SiriusXM subscriptions. I have plenty of legal music. (I did buy two CDs last year, which I wrote about here .)
How can we get the RIAA to spend its time plotting to help consumers rather than hunting them? I don’t have the answer, but I sure wish someone would figure it out so we can stop having to hear all the negative chatter on Slashdot. It’s only a matter of time, right? I don’t know about you, but I can’t take it anymore, and I’m disappointed that the music industry hasn’t found a whole bunch of ways to keep making money in the digital world. In the meantime, I’ll just keep skipping those articles.