Dave's Lounge

Boycotting the major labels feels like it's getting harder to do every year.

Anyone who has subscribed to this podcast for a while knows — and likely shares — my general disdain for the RIAA and the small group of large corporations that support it. (Which hasn't quite been whittled down to three yet, if you're keeping count.) These are the people who spent years telling us they were fighting for the rights of artists, when most of us knew they did more to strip artists of their rights than anyone else. They tried to convince us that sharing music was a crime worthy of imprisonment and shutting down web sites on accusations of infringment with no due process was a noble cause. Liars and hypocrites with lots of money don't need any more of mine. Or yours.

These days, however, not giving money to the major labels isn't as simple as not buying their CDs or MP3s. Falling sales are slowly giving way to new methods of monetizing your attention. You pay nothing to watch a video on VEVO, for example, but the ad that runs before the video pays the labels. Thus, the label still gets paid, even though you're not doing the paying.

(The fact that Barack Obama's re-election campaign is buying up a lot of those ads bothers me. Sure, this is where the eyeballs of potential young voters might be, but the end result is the President funneling campaign contributions to the RIAA — not a surprise, given how many former RIAA lawyers now work for Obama's Department of Justice, but still a bit troubling.)

This is also true for many music streaming services. Even if you don't pay for Pandora, the labels still get paid every time a song whose rights they control gets played on Pandora, thanks to the advertisements. This is true for many other onlne music services as well.

Which brings us to Spotify.

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