Gavin Castleton: The Great American Bottleneck

This message is to every musician speaking out against file sharing:
get your facts straight, and stop regurgitating everything the major label tells you.
Anyone still clinging to the cage-format for music is either a middleman or lazy. Squidnecks

You major label suckers make me laugh
Do you really think your label would come out and say, "Hey we cut your paycheck in half because you've got to help pay for the 250 billion copies we give away. Have they mentioned when they cut new releases by 25% sales dropped 4.1% and they blamed it on P2P? Have they mentioned that they responded to that drop by raising the cost of your CD $1 every year? Does that seem like a good business move to you? Or does that smell like fear?
Ask yourself what kind of business would cut research and development first? I'll tell you: the business that's about to make it's bed up in a mother fuckin hearse.
While Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are trying to convince you that free listeners are a bad thing, those same five labels that pay them are charging you $500,000 to buy you spins
While you're negotiating whether or not the latest Napster pays you 1/3 of a cent per download, Comcast and AOL are turning the information highway into a toll road.
you know the end is near when Britney Spears is calling it a moral issue
they've positioned you right between their wallets and your fans
they can't really expect to turn the tide with a few pathetic lawsuits
So you gotta ask yourself how does one stop a flood? You build a damn.
IT'S THE ISPs, IT'S THE ISPs!
Comcast will have every last consumer on their knees
starting with 5.3 million subscribers to cable access high speed
they own the wires, so they can discriminate with bandwidth and queuing fees
guaranteed monopoly by the FCC so

We're standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it's drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
until businessmen are businessmen
and art is art again. Rock

this is not an issue of children not recognizing value in art
this is an issue of children recognizing value-less art
getting artists paid doesn't even play a part
The truth is
for the first time since it's creation, the playing field of American music
was almost leveled, and that, in the opinion of five
big wallets, is unacceptable.
Finally the world was given a voice to respond to the one-sided conversation conducted
by the music industry for the last 80 + years. Anyone who tells you that we've always
had a voice, and it's in the form of money spent, knows good and well where your money
goes when there's only one product on the shelf. You disagree? We can discuss it every four years in November
This already happened but most people weren't alive or don't remember. Radio showed up in the 20's and labels panicked, declared unlicensed broadcasts illegal, and lobbied all sorts of garbage until Capitol Records came along and broke ranks in '42. When they rose to the top of the pile, the other labels woke up and embraced radio too.
we already know how the story ends - the new technology becomes consolidated and sold to one or two old white men.

Maybe the RIAA isn't right, it's just afraid.
Afraid that artists will find a new way to get paid
maybe removing profit from the picture will expose the parasites
who spent 19 million in campaign donations every year to extend your copyrights
we'll see who's still making records when there's no compensation.
if there's no beer at the party, the only people left will be there for the conversation.
Maybe art is only art when it's depraved.
Maybe the deck is so stacked, we need to start from scratch.

We're standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it's drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
and though I may soon be swept away
I can't wait to see who steps in to take my place