RIAA/MPAA are just middle men

Posted on Sunday, Mar 19, 2006 at 12:52 AM in Digital Media

A revelation hopefully more artists and creative professionals will come to is neatly summed up in this post from Powazek. We'll only see more of them come to the same conclusions as they learn to fully harness the distribution models provided by the Internet. Singers, Writers, Artists and all no longer need middlemen to market and sell their works around the world. I almost feel sorry to the MPAA representative sent to SXSW but then I remember who she works for.

And that's really the problem, isn't it? There are these industries of middlemen - RIAA, MPAA - that claim to "protect artists" but what they're really protecting is themselves. Artists (and I include myself in that word) need to rise up and tell these people to go get stuffed. We can decide when a mashup is perfectly fine with us. We can decide to embrace file traders to build awareness of our work. We don't need you anymore. You're just holding us back.