Gospel music and RIAA

I've just gotten back into town from my European trips, and have a ton of notes to post here. I can't resist, however, commenting first on a short piece I heard on Minnesota Public Radio this morning as I was dropping the kids off at camp. On their "Future Tense" show they were interviewing John Styll of the Gospel Music Association</a>, about that organization's "church-based campaign to educate young people about the morality of music file-sharing."

At one point Styll went so far as to suggest that "the Xian industry do stand in line with the RIAA, we support those efforts." I wish it didn't bug me so much that people who explicitly claim the label "Christian" should have bought so thoroughly into the RIAA's line. But it does. I tried to argue at ATLA a few weeks ago that there are real theological reasons why communities of faith ought to be supporting artists, but I don't for a minute believe that RIAA -- or its younger cousin, the GMA, is really interested in that. They are interested in milking as much profit as they can out of their distribution networks.

It's not the artists who are being hurt by content downloading, it's the distribution industry, at least primarily. The interviewer challenged Styll as to whether perhaps Christian music served a "ministerial" purpose which might be served by broad downloading, but Styll seemed unable to understand that point.

Styll was emphasizing that music is "stuff," material culture that is owned by somebody and thus needs to be paid for if shared. He kept saying "thou shalt not steal" -- but does he understand in any way how the RIAA steals -- regularly, and with the cover of law -- from artists?

I find this fascinating, particularly the emphasis on digital bits being "stuff" that is real and material, and on intellectual property "still being property." I agree that it is real and material! Perhaps even that a property model might be an effective way to manage it. But Christianity also argues against certain kinds of "privatization" of property. And in so many other contexts religious communities are asserting that the "virtual" is NOT real, that online communities can't be communities because they are not tangibly physical. So it is amusing, in one sense, to find a Christian organization arguing so vehemently that digital stuff IS stuff. Sigh. When will these distribution industries learn from Apple's recent experience with the iTunes store?