That may be true but it also creates a false audience, or at least an audience whose willingness to spend money can’t be anticipated in any tangible way. Where’s Taylor Swift’s blog love.

Piss-poor written article there, Weiss. First off, you fail to realize your own hypocrisy. Going on a crusade with the “down with THE MAN” diatribe that is Google for doing a search and destroy on MP3’s but yet using their same service to post endless (and quite boring) YouTube vids of the latest band you deem to be fab. Where do you draw the line?

I’m no proponent of the RIAA or it’s bastard European love child Web Sheriff for I think their tactics employ those similar to Chicago-based gangster racketeering behavior where they become a law onto themselves pulling and picking on which “illegal” downloader should be fined and sent to jail and others only slapped with a stern warning.

What most “bloggers” fail to realize is that it does cost the artist and/or label to record the music that someone simply right clicks for a month’s use in their shitty iPod. And assuming that you do have a job in between writing for the LA Weekly how do you think you’ll seriously work without being paid? Granted, that gorillas at the RIAA most likely distort their economic losses in order to gain more legal clout but this world runs on money, not and iPod battery and what will you do when the artists you claim to promote (no matter how good or terrible) have no finances to cover their basic cost of living? Despite what some believe being in a band isn’t all about scoring skag or screwing groupies while riding in a limo to your Radio City gig. It’s about making money as well. Not that should be the sole incentive of forming a band (see: Jonas Brothers) but we all have to eat, right?

Google has become scarier and scarier with not only taking 3D photos of where we live but now upgrading Google Earth a step forward by mapping the oceans so we can drain that too of fish, whales, whatever. But that’s another subject. So no wonder they are the latest puppet of the RIAA giving them credence to pick and choose whose blog lives or dies. But in this case, I think they are right.

I’m not sure the average cost for a studio album from a major label runs these days but taking the new one from Springsteen or U2 as an example I’d say well over $250,000 from artwork to the producer and engineer fees. If that record becomes “leaked” and downloading and spread across the internet like a Pair Hilton STD what are the odds that the artist themselves will have to pay more and more to make up for the loss the next time their contract warrants another album? And yet, bloggers constantly bitch about CD’s being astronomically high - sure that may be due to the store’s overhead but not all of it. But hey, that’s okay, U2 are “corporate rock” and bloggers are doing the world a favor by serving up dish after dish of the most biased pseudo-journalism crap that no one in their right mind can ever take seriously by telling me how over-paid Bono is and how a right-click is going to solve that issue while all the time promoting some two-bit shitty suffering for their art musician who in just ten months time is completely forgotten about believing that it levels the playing field of who gets heard and who doesn’t.

You want to slam Google and the RIAA for slowly progressing the internet into some sort of a monitored police state for people speaking their views like they do in China? Fine. I’m behind you 100% but for f-sake take down those YouTube vids in the process and stand by your own convictions.