Realized my playlist was gone from Myspace last night. Seems the RIAA and record companies sued playlist.com for copyright infringements simply for creating an index of songs on the web! Seems the record companies want money simply for people playing the songs over the internet...not just owning the songs...saying that if people could play them on-demand on the web, why would they need to go purchase the music? Um...so they can have it on their iPods and when they are not connected to the internet, like in their car where some of us spend a good 2 hours of our day? Seems like stupid greed to me! If people cannot download the song, what is the big deal? They went after many of the streaming radio stations a while back for the same kind of thing. I remember Radio Nigel having something posted a while back about it. Apparently, they even went after Pandora.
In my opinion, a playlist is nothing more than the mix tapes of old! How many of us recorded songs off of the radio, and created mix tapes back in the 1980's? I know I had a ton of them. I'm sure the RIAA and the music labels knew this was going on, and it drove them crazy that they couldn't figure out how to make money off of it! Mix tapes were an expression of the person...favorite songs that had meaning in the person's life...a mix tape about a particular situation...a mix of their music style. You could usually tell something about a person by getting in their car and popping in their mix tape. Playlists are the same thing! We post them on our blogs and social network pages to give insight to who we are and what is going on our lives...an expression of ourselves! Going through a breakup? You will usually find songs on a person's page that express how they feel about it...be it they caught the other person cheating or they just drifted apart...you can tell by the music that person put up on their playlist.
If anything, playlists help people figure out what artist did the song, so that they can go out and buy the CD or MP3s...actually helping the artists make money. I know many of the radio stations around here are bad about saying who did the song and what the name of the song is. I don't know how many times I had to try to Google a song through lyrics because of this, and it's not always easy. If there aren't lyrics, you have to wait until you happen upon someone's page playing the song, and then you can look at the playlist to get the info you were looking for! Now, some radio stations will post a text listing of their playlist, but you have to know the exact time of day you heard the song to figure it out. Not many people really look at the clock when they hear a song, let alone remember it hours later when they remember they wanted to go look up a song. At best, I can remember what I was doing, which gives me a round about time within an hour, but even then, I need to find a way to pull up all the songs listed that I don't recognize so that I can figure out which song it was.
Well, just realized I got up on a soap box! I've said how I feel about it all. I just think it is all stupid! A DJ doesn't have to pay royalties to record companies to spin a record at a party...why should these folks have to pay royalties to stream the music on the web?