Apple and Pepsi Ad Sports RIAA Targets 683
eefsee writes "USA Today is running a story about Pepsi's Superbowl ad for their iTunes promotion. The ad will apparently feature teens sued by the RIAA, including one young woman who holds out a Pepsi and says, 'We are still going to download music for free off the Internet.' The RIAA response? 'This ad shows how everything has changed.'"
COOL (Score:0, Interesting)
super bowl watching tip (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, I noticed last year that if I hit my 30 second skip right when a play ended, it would usually take me right to the snap for the next play. With the 30 seconds of downtime between plays gone, football was actually kind of interesting!
Not at all stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
it's kind of funny..... (Score:5, Interesting)
yeah they were downloading and whatever, but they are not bootleggers out there selling copies. they are just kids. the article said a few of the kids said they will use some of the money they get to pay their $3000 settlement.
One thing the RIAA is powerless to do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Screw that. From now on, I am only buying used.
Trading spaces... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:super bowl watching tip (Score:3, Interesting)
pepsi (Score:4, Interesting)
5 years ago, someone giled a lawsuit over the pepsi points/harrier jet [slashdot.org] ad.
A couple weeks ago, a suit was trown out (because it was filed after the statute of limitations) when a boy died after swallowing a pin [azcentral.com] used to "shotgun" a soda.
No word yet if anyone has been killed trying to drink pepsi one while sky-diving.
Advertising supported music??? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, when this ends and downloads slow down, will Fritos, KFC, etc. be the next to give away music downloads? And how long do you think it will take until all music downloads are sponsored by advertising dollars?
Just my $.02
Re:super bowl watching tip (Score:5, Interesting)
Then there are two things that I enjoy watching.
1. Seeing what everybody on the field is doing. Because a typical football play only lasts about 8 seconds, everybody on the field has a specific job, and they all know what everybody else is doing. When you start watching football you just follow the ball (which is unfortunately what TV does also). But start following other players instead. It's neat to see a running play work because the center pulled, etc.
2. Second-guess the coach. Football has a lot in common with a turn-based strategy game. (Every turn is about 10 seconds.) During the down-time, decide what you think the offense should be doing, or what the defense should be doing.
I know the
Tim
Bad taste is a hot ticket right now (Score:2, Interesting)
You can do _very_ well advertising to the younger end of the spectrum (0-30) with bad-taste advertising, the more complaints you get and advertising standards violations you make the better! I would have put that 12 year old and the 70 year old together and got them to say "fuck you RIAA!" and the next day i might have 5000 complaints and 3 subpoenas from the RIAA, but im telling you - everyone would be buying my product.
The truth is... (Score:5, Interesting)
"RIAA has filed 914 lawsuits since it began cracking down in September, including 532 this week."
Mitch, if things have changed, why are you still filing lawsuits? The truth is as long as a product's price is artificially inflated, there will be a black market for that product. You guys never learn, you were celebrating after shutting down napster, but what happened? 5 more popped up in it's place. Shutdown Kazaa, what's going to happen? People will move to tools like soulseek and newsgroups.
If you simply provided a high quality product at a fair price over the internet, then piracy would be reduced to 10% of what it is today. Instead you provide low quality audio recordings with what you call Digital Rights Managemet (Consumers should call this what it is, Digital Restrictions Management, because who's rights is it managing?), at the same price you charge for a physical product.
I hope you don't learn your lesson. I hope more and more artists will see the light, and manage there own distribution chanels with the internet. The world would be a better place without the RIAA. Music survived before you, and it will live on after you're gone. Good riddens!
How about a Linux "giveaway"... (Score:2, Interesting)
S
I say way to go Pepsi and Apple... (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems like the RIAA are the only ones that aren't getting the message to me.
Re:One thing the RIAA is powerless to do... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, sooner or later the sales of physical records are going to fall anyway. The only thing I need physical CDs for are backup purposes e.g. in the case my computer hardware was damaged and I needed to recreate the digital copies.
I have all my CD's encoded in a digital format and because of all the convenience it gives me, I'm not willing to give it up. The physical discs will sooner or later become obsolete. Not this year or the next year (I mean there are still people who buy new vinyl records) but in the end, it'll all be just bits in general-purpose storage formats. The costs of maintaining separate storage formats just for music will become too high.
Today's vocabulary lesson: weasel words. (Score:3, Interesting)
"This ad shows how everything has changed," says Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman. "Legal downloading is great because fans are supporting the future of creative work in America." (emphasis mine)
That's right, Mr. Bainwol. Fans support the artists. Not the RIAA. The fans.
I have discovered many bands that I like a lot because a friend sent me an MP3. I don't think that any performer out there (okay, unless you're a member of Metallica) would complain about losing that $.02 in royalties, if it meant another person buying the CDs and attending the concerts. Which is exactly what I do, but I'm not buying crap from the latest over-hyped bubblegum act, either.
Either way, the RIAA loses.
And that's just fine with Y.T.
Addendum: I'm not exactly pleased with the whole 'wink-n-nod' attitude that the commercial apparently displays, either. Instead of bringing attention to the issue of a private organization taking legal enforcement powers unto itself, I see large corporations engaged in a mutual luv-a-thon. And there's a perverse logic to the whole thing: turn it into a joke, and people will quit whining.
At least until Grandma faces a $1.5 million dollar lawsuit for her supposed obsession with the musical stylings of Ol' Dirty Bastard.
Re:Sure the RIAA gets their cut from iTunes sales. (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes. Here's an unrelated anecdote that explains why I think that. One day (quite a long time ago), Conan O'Brian mentioned on his show that they have to pay the movie studio in order to show the short movie teasers that an actor brings with him. The MPAA are very defensive about their copyrights. Even if they have some movie clip that isn't worth anything anymore, they'd rather it not be seen that for someone to see it for free. I don't doubt the RIAA is the same way. Note that this is also the reason lots of old movies will eventually go extinct. Even though there's a large enough fan base out there to have a grassroots effort to restore old movies, it'll never happen.
Re:Controversy (Score:1, Interesting)
The RIAA really doesn't make a lot money (Score:5, Interesting)
He noted that for every 10 high potential artist a major label promotes, only 1 makes it. Typically, it costs a large label around 1 million to promote, pay, and produce a single artist (I once worked for a label, I can confirm this).
So this means, it cost about 10 million dollars to find one needle in a haystack. Those artist who do "make it" have to, essentially, pay for the giant losses made by the 9 other artists who didn't make it.
According to Jobs, the record industry is a fairly shitty business.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Important note for oldtimers (Score:5, Interesting)
There are kids out there who were 12 when it was 1998, they saw the heyday of MP3s and the dot com boom in junior high school, they've almost graduated now and the RIAA is trying to tell them that what they've been doing on their computers for as long as they remember is illegal.
They're going to have a very hard time convincing these kids that CDs are worth money. You might as well be selling 8-tracks.
So then the RIAA can run an Ad (Score:1, Interesting)
Is this a great country or what?
Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
CDBaby actually *is* our distributor. Through them, our CDs are available via iTunes and pretty much all the other digital music stores, as well as Tower Records and the CDBaby site itself.
Derek at CDBaby is a brilliant, brilliant man, and I have nothing but respect for him, and his whole company.
They take only a very, very tiny cut of sales revenue (like 6 cents or something), leaving us the majority of the sale.
Re:Downloading is Theft? (Score:2, Interesting)
If sharing is wrong, we don't need lawyers. We need education. We need the RIAA to show up, with armani suits and alligator brifcases, in droves across the nation to every kindergarten and elementary school to stress the evils of sharing your belongings. We need to stress to these young minds just how important it is to hog everything you can get your hands on in your pile and make sure no one else can enjoy it without your fee. Show the benefits of the Patent system, so no-one else can even do anything themselves without violating someone elses's "right". Imagine, they won't even be able to stack one block on top of another without paying a fee!!!
It seems one of the major problems facing our Congress is how to pen law that makes it illegal for some people to do something that cause others financial loss, while holding certain others indemnable for doing the exact same thing... while not looking like they are failing to represent the populace as a whole.
As America gets "down to business", we rely on the rest of the world to build stuff for us. We, here in the Free World of the United States of America will spend our bountiful resources and immense capital account surpluses bickering over whose entitled to what. Our business plan is built on our ability to exact fees to allow others to do anything. If we can sell the rest of the world on this plan, we can make our business executives rich beyond comprehension.
Re:uploaders, not downloaders (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not as clear cut regarding books.
Re:The 12 Year Old... (Score:1, Interesting)
1. don't create power vacuums which may harbor terrorists in the future.
2. Give our middle finger a rest and start cooperating with the UN and the world... and the American people for that matter.
3. Do not go on long vacations and ignore terror-warnings from CIA and government officials.
4. Reread anything containing the word "Geneva"
5. Reword phrases like "Bring 'em on"
6. Find a four star general (preferably a West Point graduate) that knows about defense yet is intelligent. If such a person exists.
Re:Good. (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and can you imagine, if banks were as bad as the RIAA: Being only able to checks provided by your bank, which they would sell at a premium of course. OH! But you could buy blank checks (sorta like blank cd-audio discs) but you'd hafta pay a tax on them for the bank's lost revenue.
I know this is off topic, but the point is that the RIAA does things that if banks or grocery stores or hell, EVEN CAR LOTS tried, people would revolt.
Re:The 12 Year Old... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with that is that they're LABELS. (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH: There INDEPENDENT record labels that aren't part of some Multinational Conglomerate, that aspire to shed light on, and simultaneously elevate bands in certain genres. Some of these include SubPop, Matador, and so on. A little research should provide a healthy list of "indy" labels that are friendly to the "digital" segment of the population. Many even distribute in MP3 or other digital format. Warp records (Aphex Twin, Richard D. James, and Squarepusher just to name a few (one?) artists that *cater* to the notion that people want that control over their purchase.
Sometimes, these labels were the labels America's favorite bands start out on, and therefore release their best material with. Like mentioned about Nirvana. Soundgarden and Sonic Youth started there too. Along with most good "alternative" artists.
Re:Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Pepsi has one of the largest advertising budgets out there. When they talk, radio and tv stations listen. If Pepsi calls up your local channel 5 news station and says "we don't like the negitive spin you put on that RIAA story", the tv station will not do it again ever because they don't want Pepsi to forget to advertise on their TV station. A quick searh of Pepsi and its closely replated compaines shows it spent over a billion dollars last year advertising. The RIAA members sales of music were about $12b.
It will be interesting to see how the TV news covers RIAA issues now that Pepsi's ads implys its not completely evil to download songs.
Re:Hackable? (Score:3, Interesting)
36^8 = 2,821,109,907,456 codes / 100,000,000 free songs means that 1 out of 28,211 randomly selected codes would work (on average). That is assuming that each free song has a code (they might be "tiering" it so that some codes are redeemable for more than one free song).
That is quite a few, and I would hope that they would also have some sort of brute-force lockout mechanism.
I got an iTMS gift certificate not long ago, but I don't remember how many digits it had...12-15 at least. And I typed it correctly the first time, so I don't know about brute-force safeguards either.
Re:The RIAA really doesn't make a lot money (Score:3, Interesting)
Artists get paid out of the profits from the sale of their material. The record companies don't really spend any money to pay them.
Artists have to pay back the label for studio time, recording materials, promotional material, costs of album fabrication, lawyers fees, and a half dozen other things before they see one cent of the money from their music.
A great example of this was what "Tribe Called Quest" went through, their album "Low End Theory" sold over 2 million copies, after taxes and the record company's cut they got about 35 thousand dollars.
At the time, CDs were selling for about $15 each, and cassettes were going for about $10 each. So let's make a few assumptions. Let's round the sales figure down to an even 2 million units. Let's also assume that they only sold cassettes. 2 million copies of a $10 product. This translates to $20 million. Let us also assume the record company paid $1.50 for each of the cassettes. That leaves $17 million. Let's say $4 million for studio time, production, and promotion. $13 million. Of that, less than $1 million actually went to the group, but let's round up to an even million.
In this case, $12 million dollars is the minimum amount of money that the label pocketed from the hard work and determination of their artist.
The point that I am making here is that Steve Jobs doesn't know too much about the recording business.
LK
Re:Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've previously pointed out hereabouts that in any other business, what the labels do would be considered moneylending at usorious (thus illegal) interest rates. Cripes, it's probably cheaper to get a loan from the mob!
Instructions: 1) Remove head from arse (Score:1, Interesting)
2) Read:
3. Profit!!!
(hey, where did my underpants go?)