RIAA and thier hidden tax

Every Music CDR since the AHRA was enacted has a hidden tax built into the price! (2% of the manufacturers sales) This is supposedly to pay the artists for home recording. Who Collects the Tax? The RIAA under the auspices of the AARC. Who shares office space with the RIAA and has many of the RIAA employees working for it. I haven't been able to find one artist that was paid a cent of the money. 4% is set aside for non-featured artists, of the remainder 40% for the featured artist and 60% for the labels. To date I have not found one artist who has received one cent of this money. (Source: RIAA website) In addition every CD recorder has a $2.00 surcharge built into the price that goes directly to the RIAA

www.boycott-riaa.com...
This is outrageous. First they harrass file traders and now we come to find out that they are porfiting from the sales of CD recorders

Luckily I only buy at non-RIAA labels. You can check which labels, artists and albums are associated with the RIAA here.

Originally posted by amantine
Luckily I only buy at non-RIAA labels. You can check which labels, artists and albums are associated with the RIAA here.

My sincere hope is that indie lable will flourish as file traders flock to them

I havent bought a CD in 5+ years after they got to �18 ($30) in price. Their continued actions make sure I will never buy one again.

Originally posted by Flyer
I havent bought a CD in 5+ years after they got to �18 ($30) in price. Their continued actions make sure I will never buy one again.

Same here. Between d/l etc, there really is no need. The record company created this problem, kept raping us with the costs and it came back to bite them in the ass. Reap what you sow

Here in Finland all CD-R discs have tax which is about 20% of their price. (but one point to EU from this, from now on I'm buying CD-Rs from Estonia)

They would like to add these taxes to HDs and to anything that can storage data.

The RIAA is the most stupid association I've ever know, first when the cd came out the pretext was that the technology was expensive, than the cd's got cheaper end what do they do? fix prices, that was a mistake, first you do not sale one thing that cost you 25 cents and make a profit of more than 10,000 % and get away with it, is not possible, people got smatter and is time for the companies to stop ripping people, if they want to sell cd's again they have to drop prices 2.50 to 3.00 dlls per cd it is fair enough, not only they will start to sell cd's again with those prices but they will terminate the pirate cd's, because everybody wants original material, but not everybody can afford to pay 15 to 20 dlls. per cd.

[edit on 4-7-2004 by Spain]

I have no sympathy for the RIAA. They blame their problems on file traders. I got news for you RIAA. People trade movies too. You don't see the MPAA acting like idiots in response. Why? Because they produce a GOOD product. You get something of value when you buy their product. As a result they are seeing record sales. For the same price of a DVD I can buy MAYBE one music cd that has maybe one or two good songs on it. Many times the price of the music cd is more than the movie dvd. Lets look at marketing. The movie industry does a far better job of marketing than the music industry. How about the shows? I can take my entire family to a movie and buy snacks for the price of one concert ticket. The music industy has failed in every way when it comes to promoting their product and when it comes to providing the consumer a real value. But somehow that is supposed to be our fault.

Originally posted by Spain
The RIAA is the most stupid association I've ever know, first when the cd came out the pretext was that the technology was expensive

That was because they had to invest to CD production machinery but after those "start expenses" CDs are much cheaper to produce than C-cassettes. (but instead prices went up)

Originally posted by E_T
Here in Finland all CD-R discs have tax which is about 20% of their price. (but one point to EU from this, from now on I'm buying CD-Rs from Estonia)

They would like to add these taxes to HDs and to anything that can storage data.

Canada too. This tax goes way back to blank cassettes in the pre CD R days. The RIAA are trying to stop home recording whilst reaping a huge windfall meant to compensate them for same.

I won't hold my breath waiting for a refund.

yeah the RIAA is totally despicable. Prices of music cds are unbelievably high, and when companies such as cd-wow import the music cheaply in the UK, they got lawsuits filed against them. Music CDs need to drop their prices drastically or face dieing out. Artists won't suffer *that* much because people will still flock to see them live, where the big bucks are.

Originally posted by slick
yeah the RIAA is totally despicable. Prices of music cds are unbelievably high, and when companies such as cd-wow import the music cheaply in the UK, they got lawsuits filed against them. Music CDs need to drop their prices drastically or face dieing out. Artists won't suffer *that* much because people will still flock to see them live, where the big bucks are.

Exactly, they have gauged the public waaaaay to long on CD despite the rock bottom production costs. Its high time thier tactics turn on them and bite them in the ass. They had a oppurtunity to controll p to p file trading by letting people trade on Napster for a fee. Most of us that used it would have been willing to pay $20 a month for the service but nooooooo they had to try and sue everybody. Now thier business model is almost finished.

The RIAA claims the high CD costs are due to the recording cost but a DVD costs the same as a CD and they cost 10 times as much to produce.

They also blame P2P for reduced sales but if you put together the fact that 1) most music is crap now and 2) when I was a teen there wasnt much else to spend your money on apart from music, now theres DVDs, computer games, mobile phones etc for the kids to spend their money on so of course they are going to get less money!

They really dont have clue.

[edit on 2004-7-5 by Teknik]

Originally posted by Teknik
The cost of CD's in Indonesia is around $3 USD
for popular artists. But they are becoming rare, as DVD's and MP3 collections become more popular.A cd of MP3's only costs about $2.50,
and there is so much more music for the buck!

As I said above the greedy record companies created the propblem and its going to end up sinking them.
Check out
www.boycott-riaa.com...
they have a great page on some of the ins and outs of the record industry links to indie lables etc.