The Recording Industry Is Evil

blizzcon 2021 happened a few days ago now given the distrust most hold against this company and its partner in crime and this sack of [ __ ] i wouldn't blame you for not knowing that this ever happened at all but that's okay it doesn't really matter far more interesting than the continuous stream of overpriced swill emanating from this thing was what happened on the twitch stream during this event those who tuned into the metallica quote concert end quote were initially greeted with several aging husks of boomer flesh stumble upon the stage who i am informed were actually metallica as they strum the opening chords to popular tune pour some sugar on me the twitch stream got a little wacky automated copyright systems detected the use of copyrighted music being played on the official twitch channel by a band who owned the music a band that has garnered notoriety for fighting against consumer rights in general copyright jigglypus call it karma call it a bad case of the wednesdays but the internet laughed and the internet cried and we all moved on with our lives but this got me thinking about how the world ever entered this state granted this is just another day in the dystopian future of 2021 i've already made a whole video that was mostly about copyright before but in that video i never really delved specifically into music and music copyright law you're probably aware that music copyright has always been a pretty iffy thing for content creators surely streaming a few seconds of a game soundtrack that just contains licensed music shouldn't warrant legal action yet here we are something i've heard very often is why don't the government fix this why don't the government step in and tell these companies no no that's bad well see they could but they they don't and they won't see here in the us of [ __ ] you in the a there's a little stipulation in u.s law that allows a crossover of the corporation in governmentation worlds a large company can send money to special interest groups and lobbying firms or straight up just donate to an acting political figure why would you want to do this it's a bribe it's just a bribe it gives a major incentive for the politician to propose bills that would benefit their uh beneficiaries and yeah while most of the time this comes in big buckets of cash sometimes it's a position in the corporation if that acting political figure gets kicked out as i've said it is bribery even according to the dictionary so you might be wondering why is this very illegal act still legal well because they just changed the word that's it you might remember recently there was a proposed bill to send any streamers of any copyrighted material to jail so accidentally playing a game that just has a radio station could get you thrown in the big house it was outlandish and certainly not in the public's interest but the senator that proposed it yeah this is what happened the entertainment industry just threw a couple bucks at him yup that's it this isn't uncommon in fact most laws and strange stipulations of the legal system exist solely because of these bribes and while the copyright system and everything else i'm going to talk about today could easily be fixed it won't now in regards to this affair specifically it really was the advent of digital audio that put fear into the hearts of the recording industry see back in the day music and sounds were recorded onto a physical object whether it be a big old cylinder a flat cylinder a square shaped cylinder whatever the information on these mediums were little bumps and grooves that emulated the sound waves naturally carried through the air and when connected to these fancy machines the sound could be replicated wow a bam if you wanted to copy the information to another disk or groove it would come at the loss of some quality if you played the recording back too many times natural wear and tear would do its thing and quality would also be lost this made it so record companies weren't too worried about any potential copies being made of these songs but see when it comes to digital audio it's an entirely different beast it's all defined by information there would be no potential wear and tear over time and most importantly to the industry this could be duplicated infinitely without loss of quality yes this was very concerning especially to the riaa or the recording industry association of america this group contains the biggest players in the music industry and most problems that you might have with audio copyright can be traced back to them or at least one of its members now i'm not gonna lie this group is is [ __ ] and this makes sense when you consider that it's an organization filled with people who literally have no talent other than exploiting other people and when you get a group of these kind of people together and you give them a bunch of money and lobbying power to influence laws it's gonna get bad pretty quickly so as digital audio was entering the forefront and actually becoming affordable to the average consumer the organization started to flex its muscles a bit see sony had produced a digital audio tape format in the late 80s it looked like a cassette yeah but the information on the tape was entirely digital problem was that this was on the cusp of being cheap enough for average people to actually start buying it which would mean potential duplication issues and we don't want that the riaa wanted to stop this before [ __ ] got real so they went to congress and they were like hey so this thing here we don't like it yeah digital digital is it's bad it's a fad so if you don't mind can you just ban this format and congress said no after all it might look a bit suspicious if congress just bans a new media format for reasons so the riaa went home and thought up a new plan after a good night's sleep they returned to congress and asked for something else they said hey so if you can't flat out ban this thing i get it so you know you could just make it make it garbage you know you could kill it without killing it and we know how you can do it you put in this egregious copyright system that needs to be mandated in all recordings and devices that use this format and even worse place attacks on everything regarding this format and you know what we want the money so place the tax on it and take that tax money and just give it to us in congress they said yes and the product died right then and there this made digital audio pretty irrelevant for the decade at least for most people now while you might think cds were a bigger concern since you know they were going to be a big old thing copying a cd wasn't quite as easy as it is today cds held quite a bit of information and transferring all that data was going to be a problem cd players also weren't particularly cheap so this wasn't something the riaa would be targeting anytime soon but not all was good even though the industry had got its win it's hard to say it was on stable ground though it was apparent to everybody that digital audio would return one day and when it did you couldn't stop it even if piracy wasn't going to be a major issue there was another aspect of digital audio that was incredibly frightening to these companies since you could listen to this music as much as you wanted and there would be no degradation of sound quality there would never be a reason again to re-buy an album once you own the song you and pretty much everybody you know would own the song and with this fear in the back of their heads a lot of really wacky [ __ ] started to happen because when something's about to die you know it's gonna flail around for a little bit until yeah and it wasn't just specifically the riaa either it was the entire industry in 1996 it was revealed that the the ascap or american society of composers authors and publishers had sent letters to the girl scouts demanding royalties for singing songs in public areas it went about as well as you could expect while asscapp had claimed that it was a public relations nightmare and they tried to kind of almost apologize this was all true they did actually send letters and they did expect compensation for from the girl scouts the only reason this was changed was that public outcry and that's not even the worst of it in 1999 led by riaa lobbying specific phrasing was shoved into a random bill that would denote all musical recordings made as work for hire this would effectively mean every song ever written would not be owned in any capacity by the original artist but instead the publisher once it was discovered you saw another public outcry and this forced the hand of the riaa after all it was unlikely any artist would ever sign with a label again if they knew this was the kind of [ __ ] that was going on and fun fact the ceo of the riaa went on to do pretty much exactly what you would expect after leaving the recording industry that's right she went to work at cnn and become a political commentator and she also bought half a million twitter followers yup that's the world you live in now most people were interested in the dmca around this time the digital millennium copyright act which again i've talked about and while in some ways the dmca benefited the recording industry it was a it was a fickle thing when you get a bunch of old people together to write laws about things they don't know about weird [ __ ] happens and lucky for us some of that weird [ __ ] would benefit the consumer this came to fruition when digital audio started to come around again this time in the form of mp3 players and as you would expect the riaa was back to its old tricks yup they went to congress and they tried to do the exact same thing that they did to that digital audio tape to mp3s but this time there is specific phrasing in the dmca that allowed these to survive basically they had no recording functionality and so it would be hard to justify banning the product if you know it's just for listening to music the world was briefly ecstatic by this news at least i assume so see music was fairly close to becoming a very different medium during this era now that songs could be owned digitally and shared across the web a new mentality emerged as music as something of a public good like roads the library or trees in this era of peer-to-peer sharing any song could be at your ear tips in a few moments for free but this came with a few caveats peer-to-peer sharing isn't always the most legit thing in the world sometimes some little prick over there will just upload his malware or mislabeled tracks to get their jimmies in a bundle user interfaces weren't particularly clean or friendly to new users even by 2000s internet standards which is really low standards but then napster see napster was like music pirating but everybody could do it and they did do it it garnered a huge audience very quickly and it did it by just making the experience more convenient now i can see some of you frowning your faces and saying well the musicians of the era they probably didn't like the idea of some jackass stealing their music right but in this time period it was actually kind of a blessing for most musicians see to get discovered by a large audience in these days was nearly impossible without the backing of a major label major labels that just tried to put in that [ __ ] work for hire thing these labels are essential because they manage promotion and advertisement and effectively can make you a star it's why many pop artists don't actually write their own music they're simply a face picked by a label to play music made by somebody else for the sake of profit and in this sense it's not an even playing field obviously and many musicians would have to sell out to make a living making music but when all music is free and on the same platform well the tables shift while getting discovered still wasn't and isn't the easiest thing in the world it was finally possible it didn't necessarily matter if money wasn't flowing in from pirated downloads at least a fan base could be built up and while independent artists liked this major artists did not because well they were losing some money surprisingly enough the riaa didn't seem to hit napster the moment it went live and that's more than likely because they were old and they didn't know how computers worked and they were more concerned with the being pricks anyway back to napster it was flourishing with indie artists and big artists alike all being more popular than ever before and it was all hunky-dory hooray until it wasn't as the story goes metallica members were sitting in their local steam room rubbing each other's members when they get a call from their agent he's like hey your new song it's on the radio the band members were confused at first they had no new song they didn't even know how to play instruments after a quick check it turned out a demo for the upcoming mission impossible dose was leaked onto napster and picked up by several radio stations the band members quit rubbing each other's penises at once and said who is this napster said [ __ ] the bassist i don't know but it sounds like they're listening to our music without paying the shackles first said prickle the band demanded retribution restitution and fast so being the true fight the system punk metal heroes they aspired to be they went straight to their lawyers now the lawsuit of metallica vs napster was quite an interesting one for a number of reasons most famously the band had hired a firm to track the names of each person who downloaded their songs illegally and presented them in court now this wasn't the best look because well they were literally attacking their fans the same fans were likely the only ones still interested in metallica the public wasn't too happy about this metallica had done [ __ ] up not only did they go after napster which to many was the outlet for small bands in the basis of music as a public good but they named names they valued money over the fans but metallica cried foul they said no we were the victims our beautiful music was being listened to by people without financial compensation didn't matter the damage was done it wasn't just metallica in this lawsuit dr dre who was best known for running a scam organization that sold shitty headphones for exorbitant prices so uh yeah what a gang napster lost the case as you probably already know it was forced to shut down after removing copyrighted content music would not be nor would ever be a public good which is tragic but it's not that surprising something that should be noted about all this is how musicians make money most money doesn't come from streams or listens or whatever it comes from concert tickets and heavily inflated merchandise so yeah peer-to-peer still remained a relevant force napster was just the one that got too big for its good people would continue pirating music and i assume they probably do it today but for those seeking more legal means of music we would see the birth of a digital storefront yup and if anything signals the end of the record industry's terror over legislation and politics and its monolithic hold over the industry it was right here yeah see lobbying generally requires a lot of money but it also requires that you have the most money by the 2000s the recording industry began to look pretty weak compared to the behemoths of tech with apple and microsoft jumping into the frame the riaa couldn't really just pay off a few senators to get what they wanted if they did apple and microsoft would just be in there bam digital audio was a thing the floodgates had opened and the riaa lost what it wanted most control control that would get you money on itunes you could buy a single song or a whole album there was some element of choice there if you had a computer you could just go to the library and grab a cd and just just download all of it because [ __ ] you [ __ ] you [ __ ] you this doesn't mean the riaa was done flailing its arms about completely they notoriously charged many people with music piracy charges during this time problem is they couldn't really back up the claims they would get some money in compensation just by taking people to court but they would also just charge dead people with music piracy or kids or people that didn't even own a [ __ ] computer if i had to take a guess i think they were just going through the phone book and picking random names one of the funnier things they tried though was they wanted to convince the public that they should pay more for cds yeah and as of late they found a slow decline into relative obscurity and on streaming and then soundcloud and then youtube and then now you can just make money and not even go through a label so uh but of course they found a way they found a way to to just stick it to you one one last time how this generally works is an automated system will find the frequency of whatever you have in a video or a stream and try to match it to a song if it does it they'll just hit you with the copyright claim now usually all of this is within fair use so it's not a valid claim but they know you don't have the money to fight them in court there's really no rules when it comes to an industry like this as you may remember there was a long held copyright on the happy birthday song by warner music this would mean royalties would have to be paid every time it was sung and it would never appear in tv shows and they'd do some you know it's almost happy birthday okay and you smell like one two it turns out warner music never owned the rights in the first place yeah it should be painfully clear just how bad the recording industry is i mean this is just a brief snippet of the corruption and evil deeds that this group of evil doers has done they spent all of this time fighting for money and control but i think it was a double-edged sword they're not in a great position now i think it's gonna get a lot worse okay so here's what see exposure can be a good thing but overexposure is a really really bad thing go watch a set of tv ads and you'll find the same songs used and reused and reused for 40 [ __ ] years [Applause] breathe [Music] [Music] and this is because of how music is licensed when you license a song for use which means you won't get sued over copyright it costs money a lot of money and the only way to ensure that this investment pays off is to go for the widest reaching broadest appeal bottom of the barrel content while you might assume that this is pop music of current year this isn't actually the case pop music only appeals to younger demographics not mass audiences so what do mass audiences like nothing really i mean music tastes are so drastically diverse compared to what they were in the you know ever before but one genre has remained universally recognizable and this is your 1980s rock yes look at studies of most popular genres of music you'll find that rock right up there brock music vastly changed after the 1980s spreading out into new alternative sub-genres these all vary drastically in who they appeal to and the age demographics if you go too early with rock you get music that might seem antiquated to those gen xers and this means to target all marketable demographics the most ideal music for advertisers in licensing use is 1980s rock and metal and i guess uh this black sabbath this is why these songs are still being used after so many years and yes it's been a lot of years enough time has passed that using a 1980s rock song for advertising and licensing would be like using a 1930s song for advertising in the 70s it just wouldn't happen and they can't change it because no alternative exists because nothing else has that assured wide appeal or recognizability as such these songs have become anthems of advertisement and licensed content and it's with no younger generations having a positive association with these bands in this genre this entire collection of music will fall into obscurity and this is the strange thing about what these record labels have done to copyright law they've dug themselves into this hole it was all about short-term gains to protect interests in the here and now but a lot of it came from a failing to predict how people would actually consume content in the future nowadays licensed music is effectively contraband to content creators to the largest sector of media to the largest sector of media to appeal to these groups this means that bans like guns n roses in metallica will forever be stuck as cringe corporate rock and it's only a matter of time before they are a distant memory as time goes on this problem will only get worse so while the consumer has taken a hit or two and it might seem like the darkest of realities this is one with a silver lining the system that they have made seems to be destroying them that lifeblood of the recording industry these works is now a limited resource they shut it in a vault and now it's just gonna rot away and so that whole blizzcon metallica situation it's just a real-time manifestation of all these events metallica much like the recording industry doesn't understand what's going on and they never will so yes for whom the bell tolls indeed mr metallica you

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Keywords: KnowledgeHub, KnowledgeHub Metallica, Metallica, Metallica copyright, Metallica and copyright, Metallica vs music, knowledgehub copyright, history of copyright, copyright law, music and copyright, music copyright, knowledgehub metallica vs music, twitch, metallica twitch, metallica twitch copyright, music labels, record labels copyright, Metallica Twitch censorship, Blizzcon Metallica, Blizzcon Metallica Twitch, Youtube music, copyright history

Id: MB92J70Bmv8

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021