Saturday, April 17, 2010

Avast ye swabs! Repel thee invaders!

So I was shooting around the good ol' "series of tubez" when I found myself at the RIAA website.  At first glance I couldn't help but notice how pleasant the whole site seemed.  The format ironically reminded me of a file-sharing website I regularly find myself at... despite it's annoyingly slow download speeds.  Maybe this was all a sign.  Regardless, I looked around for a little bit when I noticed that they had a page on their site devoted to students doing reports.  I couldn't believe how convenient it all seemed to be... because hey... I'm a student doing a report.
 
It wasn't but two seconds later that I realized their "For Students Doing Reports" page was nothing more than a regular websites faq page.  And that raised a brow.  Why the hell couldn't they just call it a faqs page like a normal site?  Was their viewer base comprised of so many youth -- who just also all happen to be working on reports like myself -- that they thought it better to specialize their faqs page to just... students doing reports?  Needless to say I was interested.

And then in some sinister and mocking fashion they drop this load on you:

"Thanks for being interested in the music industry and our positions on various issues. We get many requests from students and others for information for papers and other research needs. We’re happy to help and share our perspective. Unfortunately, we can’t always answer every question. So below is a list of commonly asked questions and hopefully insightful answers. Please take a look. We hope you find it useful and informative. Good luck!"

Two things.
1 - Why can't you always answer every question? I totally understand if people are asking really ambiguous questions that require extremely long, winded responses, but are you expecting me to ignore the fact that like any other group with a cause there are some questions you would rather not have asked?
2 - What are you wishing us good luck for?  Maybe it was the way I was reading it, but that good luck reads a little sarcastic to me.  Almost like they know that I am not going to find anything they have to say useful or informative.

I should have taken their word for it because I didn't find their "For Students Doing Reports" page useful... at all.  In fact I learned more about illegal downloading from a wiki page than I did straight from the source.

I suppose on some level I expected the RIAA to have some insight and knowledge on the issue that most lacked.  I hoped they would be able to shine a light on some views that I failed to see.  Perhaps calling it a "For Students Doing Reports" page was all some subliminal ploy to share the truth about illegal downloading to students in a fashion such that they could nip this problem right in the butt: in the schools via childrens current event projects.  Maybe they would even be able to persuade me to stop illegally downloading music.  Unfortunately for them... I am going to go download some jock jams. Right. Now.

-James

3 comments:

  1. James- the ending of your post honestly made me laugh out loud.

    Definitly interesting!

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  2. I think it's about making music, not making money from music! So why not share music files, download those "jock jams"? Go ahead!

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  3. That's actually a very good point. The fact that there's a specific page "For Students Doing Reports" and that most of it is made up of very punitively skewed Q&As shouldn't raise too many eyebrows though..

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