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| Fitehouse wants a music industry revolution Band fights RIAA oppression with propaganda, postcards, songs By MICHAEL J. PUGLISI Editor in Chief Are you tired of hearing news about the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA, hereafter) suing 12-year-old children for downloading music? If so, there is a band that you should check out. Fitehouse is a band out of America’s Charm City, Baltimore, Maryland, that is “Embracing a creative, organic and RIAA-free musical future.” The group is composed of three men on a mission to spread the word about the RIAA’s negative practices. In an e-mail, guitarist and minister of propaganda Joshua Cohen likened the way record contracts are currently structured to “getting a cash advance from a credit card with exorbitant annual interest rates, share-cropping or buying truckloads of lottery tickets hoping that one day you’ll be the one that strikes it rich.” Under the current system bands are given a cash advance by record companies to pay for their promotion and recording expenses, which must be paid back. According to Cohen, bands are only able to make a profit after they’ve sold around 1,000,000 copies, which is unattainable for most acts. Therefore, when Fitehouse organized in 1998, it abandoned convention and did not associate itself with the RIAA. Instead, it has been successful through postcard campaigns and selling discs and other materials from their website, www.fitehouse.com. The Georgetonian has received several of the postcards from the current campaign. The postcards detail Fitehouse’s efforts to get the word out about the RIAA. One, adapting a term from the world of economics, in which Cohen worked before he joined the band, introduced the Discouraged Listener Index. In an independent study conducted in Baltimore, the band found that 55 percent of adults surveyed were either “discouraged” or “somewhat discouraged” from purchasing music based on the offerings that are currently available. Accordingly, if over 50 percent of the adult population is to some degree discouraged with musical offerings, why would they waste their money to buy something they don’t like? Fitehouse’s solution is this: download music from the internet that you like such as Fitehouse’s “radically good rock-n-roll,” and buy a CD at a reasonable price for a more complete selection of songs. “The market,” Cohen said, “no longer needs [the RIAA’s] services.” Fitehouse recognizes the value of the protection of intellectual property and does not advocate disregard for current laws; however, Cohen thinks that “major reforms” are in order. According to Cohen, copyright law has been “bastardized” by laws that increasingly benefit a small group of interests at the expense of a free exchange of ideas. Before the recording of music was possible, music was “the people’s music.” People could freely perform and share music. Then the music became a commodity and was strictly controlled by those who claimed ownership. Under the Fitehouse General Public Music License other groups may borrow Fitehouse’s music and modify it as long as Fitehouse is given credit as its composer. Indeed, Fitehouse is trying to foment musical revolution. Nearly every element of the website is reminiscent of revolutionary propaganda. Borrowing a page from Thomas Paine’s book, Cohen wrote his own treatise, Common Musical Sense: An Intellectual Call to Arms against the Recording Industry, Radio Deregulation, and Media Consolidation and their Threat to our National Culture and Democracy, in which he details the case against the RIAA. The treatise spells out the origins of the problems with the RIAA and provides a four-step solution. First, deregulation of the airwaves for private profit must stop; then, develop technology to benefit musicians and listeners, which is “not compatible” with the current arrangement under the RIAA’s rules; thirdly, the scouting of talent must be done in a “de-centralized” manner; and finally, Fitehouse argues that there must be more “democratic forms of dissemination” of music and other expression. In addition, the band has made propaganda posters for its site in the social realism style and one of its most recent songs, “Running Scared” is an anthem about the record industry’s abuses. In a discussion of Fitehouse, the music itself seems to be a somewhat secondary matter although it is suited to a diverse number of adult tastes, ranging from Latinesque ballads to rock/pop combinations. In the Baltimore area, the band has gotten a fair amount of press for its “Baltimore Rock Anthem” and is currently in the midst of a campaign to have the song named Baltimore’s official song. City and state officials expressed approval of the song, including former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley thinks the song is “pretty good.” So Fitehouse has its hands in a diverse range of activities, from music-making to anti-RIAA propaganda; it has even been named to a city committee for a Better Image of Baltimore. However, Fitehouse acknowledges the importance of college students in the band’s campaign. When contacted for comment Cohen reported, “we hope to make more direct contact with college students themselves. To this end, we invite everyone at Georgetown College to visit [the website] to download a copy of Common Musical Sense, to learn more about open source music and our anti-RIAA anthem “Running Scared,” to view our streaming press conferences, and most importantly, to download some free music, by golly!” |
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