post of crank

Why, yes, I am feeling rather cranky today. One should not need anti-anxiety medicine just to run the gauntlet of FREE NEWSPAPER people. I encountered six this morning alone: Two at Davis, two in the South Station turnstile area, and two outside South Station next to the Fidelity building, positioned so you had to walk between the two of them. And every paper hawker operates with one goal in mind, and that is to make sure YOU have a copy of the paper THEY push into your hand. But let's do the math here!

People, we only have so many arms and so many eyes among us. How many papers a day are we each expected to accept from the FREE NEWSPAPER people so that their daily quotas are met and they get paid and can go home? By virtue of our need for transportation, is this responsibility of paper collecting ours? Of course not! Hogwash! Nonsense, balderdash, and outright poppycock is what it is! The only ones responsible are the paper giver-outers themselves, who should do the right thing with too many spare papers, and that is to dump them somewhere and tell the newspaper people that a big dog ran off with them or something.

Additionally, I'm going to close my eyes and cover my ears and try and pretend this whole RIAA demanding royalties from broadcast radio thing isn't happening. All I've got now is this mental image of a lumbering behemoth stomping its way down the lane leaving squashed turnips in its wake and not a drop of blood to be found anywhere. And the behemoth is occasionally raising its head to bellow indignantly:

"The creation of music is suffering because of declining sales," said RIAA Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol.

And you know what? He's right! The very act of musical creation is suffering horribly because CD sales are down! I know this first-hand because the other day I stood at a xylophone, mallets in hand, and I hit one note and it went beeeng and then I wondered which note to hit next, and... and I couldn't, I just couldn't, because all I could think of was the fact that Maroon 5's latest album hadn't gone gold yet and what I could do to help that, oh gawd it was terrible. None of us are physically capable of making music when the RIAA isn't getting all the money it wants!

There are some artists who are behind the move as well; Mary Wilson, one of the original Supremes, says the radio stations have "...gotten 50-some years of free play. Now maybe it's time to pay up." And fair enough, the RIAA has always quite nobly stated this is all about artist compensation, and every now and then they tend to bring some Honest Actual Musicians out to make statements saying as much. But honestly, and you'll have to forgive me for being blunt here, but I don't think Internet downloading, CD sales in the past 7 years and royalty-free radio airplay are the sole financial reasons behind Miss Wilson's current gig at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino in Milwaukee. Hey, I've seen enough E! True Hollywood Stories to know how this stuff goes down, people, and I am willing to bet this new payment plan won't exactly put her back in diamonds and caviar. However, compensation for one's work is always something worth fighting for, and more power to her, but I do not believe this solution is the One True Solution the RIAA wants people to believe it is.

Additionally, if indeed royalties are to be collected on every song broadcast radio plays, I wonder what the RIAA is going to do with the performance royalties collected for the independent artists who are not part of the behemoth and thus won't see a dime of the extra money generated. I sure would hate for them to think that it's apparently okay to make money off someone else's work without due compensation if you're the RIAA, because right there is one organization which has built its entire reputation on fair play, rational decisions and integrity, always integrity.