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N.A.R.A.S. President Michael Greene's 44th Grammy Award Speech Debunked
(c) March 8, 2002
Well well well. The truth has finally been revealed and it looks as though we were right. The N.Y. Times is running an article* which debunks part of the speech that N.A.R.A.S. president Michael Greene gave during last weeks 44th Grammy Awards. During that speech, Greene stated that he had hired "three college-age students to spend two days with us, and download as many music files as possible from easily accessible Web sites." At the end of those two days, Greene claimed "they downloaded nearly 6,000 songs." But according to Numair Faraz, one of the students, Mr. Greene's claims are far from the truth. In fact, he told the N.Y. Times that they [the group of students] didn't spend two days downloading music; they spent three. "He said it took two days to do all the stuff, and we did it for three days from 9 to 6 and left the computers on all night long, except we'd come back and the computers would be frozen," said Faraz. Barb Dehgan, a spokeswoman for the recording industry, confirms this. She stated that they worked for two half-days and one full day. Even more revealing is the fact that most of the music files weren't even downloaded from "easily accessible Web sites." To the contrary, Faraz says that about 4,000 of the songs were sent as private message files using AOL Instant Messenger, files which friends sent them from their hard drives. As for the other files, they were "legitimate authorized downloads" from MP3.com. Since the majority of the songs came from friends' hard drives, there's "no guarantee that they were ever illegally downloaded" as they could have been songs that were ripped from legitimately purchased CDs. So as we stated, it is not music piracy that is destroying the industry. It is the industry itself. And Ken Waagner, a digital-media consultant in Chicago who was part of the recording academy's board of governors for four years, echos this sentiment. According to Waagner, "Burning, ripping and sharing is not killing music." It is "greed, stupidity and ignorance on the part of the policy wonks and further alienating the listener is the real threat to the business, and ultimately the artist's ability to be heard." *NOTE: To view the N.Y. Times article, registration (free) is required. Or just enter "cpunk" as both the Member ID and Password. Related Stories: |