Internet provides simpler music medium

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a group of over 1,600 recording labels, claims its objective is to protect intellectual property rights. Considering the sole purpose of a record label is to profit from the intellectual property of others, this is laughable. This sort of cognitive dissonance is essential to defending the recording industry, because it simply doesn't serve a purpose anymore.

Technically speaking, record companies do what their name implies. They help musicians release records. That entails recording songs, producing them, releasing them and marketing them. Today, recording equipment is inexpensive enough that musicians aren't forced to depend on record companies to finance recording an album. As for production, having a company rather than a fellow musician tell artists how to make music makes sense only if their primary goal is to make money, in which case they don't really have any business recording an album in the first place. In regard to releasing and marketing music, the fact that record companies are struggling to compete with file sharing shows just how unimportant that really is.

 With all this in mind, it's hard to feel bad for the RIAA in its massive legal battle against illegal music downloading. That's not to say illegal downloading is morally viable. While the RIAA's methods are dubious, calling it "stealing" misses the mark (stealing implies the original owner doesn't have the object anymore). You're still getting something that lots of people worked hard on for no cost to yourself, and that's wrong. However, it is clearly a symptom of customers being forced to use an outdated and dysfunctional means of distribution.

 As Radiohead aptly demonstrated with the release of "In Rainbows," it is perfectly feasible for a band to release its own music. Admittedly, most bands aren't already swimming in a giant pool of money followed by an extraordinarily zealous fan-bases and don't have their own recording studio. But the Internet is full of examples of less resource-rich bands making it without the aid of a major record label. Pomplamoose, a musical duo formed in 2008, has made excellent use of YouTube as a marketing tool and have sold over 100,000 songs online according to NPR. Similarly, Arcade Fire's album, "The Suburbs," which was released under the independent label Merge Records, released at no. 1 in the United States and gained most of its support through an elaborate website rather than traditional label support.

In an age of iPods, music just makes more sense as a digital medium. Most people who buy CDs immediately transfer the music to their computers anyway. One of the biggest advantages of this shift is that digital distribution is incredibly friendly to the experimental, do-it-yourself mentality that permeates musician culture, eliminating the need for the creativity of music to be filtered through a corporate medium.

The general system that record companies use to market music is to try to make the music they're selling sound like what's currently selling well. The advantage of using the Internet to sell music is having easy access to a huge number of people. So, artists instead can find the group of people that like what they are already making. That's the real advantage to digital distribution — finding the right audience instead of trying to create the right product.

Ultimately, creating the "right" product is all record companies are good for, and those days are over. Simply taking music without paying the people creating it isn't a viable alternative, but instead of claiming that it is destroying them, the RIAA should see it as a sign that their role in the music industry is obsolete.

Tyler Retherford is a senior anthropology major from Springfield, Mo.