Indie music review site Pitchfork offers an in-depth, maybe slightly frustrating, and uncharacteristically un-smarmy interview with entertainment lawyer Steve Gordon on the ins-and-outs of what exactly the RIAA are trying to pull. The article is appropriately titled Live at the Witch Trials, and anyone with even a cursory knowledge of some of the industry positions on file sharing know that Pitchfork isn't invoking the title of The Fall's debut for no good reason.

The interview with Gordon does a good job of laying out, pretty clearly, what some of these nebulous players in the file-sharing wars actually do (though it remains a mystery what an average work day at RIAA headquarters looks like. I bet they have a lot of meetings - in fact, they probably call meetings just to decide if they should have meetings or not.)

There are a lot of real juicy bits in here, though nothing that really gets you banging your head against the wall at first glance - this quote, for instance, gives you a bit to think about -

Pitchfork: To what extent has piracy endangered the music industry's commercial viability?

Gordon: A lot! It is estimated that tens of millions of illegally pressed CDs are distributed each year. In China and South America, counterfeit pressings are especially rampant. Although you can say that this form of piracy is old-fashioned as it is not web-based, it has flourished due to the increased availability of low-cost, high-quality digital copying machines.

P2P and CD burning are relatively recent threats to the record business. In 1999, income from sales of recorded music was approximately 15 billion in the U.S. Since then, income has continually declined and in 2004 it amounted to approximately only $11 billion (PDF file).

See, here we're talking about two different issues - the issue of PIRACY meaning when one person gets paid for selling a burnt CD of another artist's work vs. the issue of downloading an RIAA owned act in the interest of listening to it, not making a profit, and not selling it to someone who wanted to buy the CD.

Furthermore, the second half of the quote once again dodges the crucial issue that doesn't seem to jive with the RIAA party line - that a whole lot of indie artists support file sharing, because it's a new mode of distribution that gets an artist's name out in public, and that allows people to then choose if they want to support the band or not. Even if "income from sales of recorded music" dropped to a paltry $11 billion dollars, Gordon leaves out any discussion of how the money that is coming in is distributed among between the indies and the big guys. I bet you'd find a big chunk that hasn't necessarily disappeared to the demonic file-sharers, but has shifted over to indie artists.

At another point, Gordon states:

According to their website, RIAA members create, manufacture, and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.

This blows my mind for a couple of reasons - first of all, the use of the term "member" here is a liberal one - I'd be surprised if anyone working directly for the RIAA is in a band, or is creating, manufacturing, or distributing anything.

Secondly, what constitutes a "legitimate sound recording"? Is there such thing as an "illegitimate sound recording"? or maybe just an "illegitimate sound"? Sounds like legalese to me.