/ Cory Doctorow / 6:46 am Sun May 22, 2011

RIAA boss takes home $3 mil+

Found amid a list of top compensation for industry lobbying association CEOs in 2009 (the last year for which we have stats): Cary Sherman, President of the RIAA, and his whoppng pay-packet: $3,185,026. That'd sure buy a lot of ramen for starving musicians.

Another Member Of The Overpaid (Thanks, @kembrew!)

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  2. Amazon sells cartons of ramen: 240 packs for $184.95 – If you’ve got $3,185,026 to spend, you’d be able to buy 4,136, 397 individual packs of ramen. That’s 1,378, 799 days of ramen (3 a day). Enough to feed 45,960 aspiring musicians for one month.

    1. $0.77 each?! You could get it at the grocery store for 10 cents each when I was in colle… was it really that long ago?

  4. According to the RIAA valuation of digial music tracks, that means he should be able to purchase about 13 songs per year.

  5. That this should come as no surprise makes it no less disgusting and equally so that the music industry should have this peripheral parasite clinging to it.

  6. I’m suddenly feeling an overwhelming desire to torrent the hell out of some music.

  7. $3M is about 10% of the amount by which Jeff Bezos wealth increased last year. When can we expect to see Boing Boing make snarky comments about ramen noodles for aspiring writers?

    1. Presumably when Jeff Bezos starts lobbying to make massive monitoring & censorship infrastructure a legal requirement in order to protect his profits, all the while screwing over the very people he claims to speak for.

    2. Jeff Bezos does not run an industry association on behalf of writers or publishers.

      1. Right you are, Cory. I consider the lock, stock and larder of the RIAA a “peripheral parasite.”

  8. @tomslee that makes no sense. Bezos is a businessman that sells content outright. The RIAA doesn’t sell music, only ‘facilitates’ the selling of that music, and not very well. Bezos has adapted to the digital age (quite well) and earned his money, the guy in the article could be considered an outright crook.

    1. Yeah, his skills could have him making minimum wage in the private sector!

      “You already have fries with that, so you owe $1.2 million dollars in licensing fees before you can eat.”

  11. It takes the definition of “scum” to a whole new level.
    That’s why i made a wow NEVER ever to “purchase” any piece of music from the “legitimate” sources until this whole pathetic copyright-meets-the-new-medium issue gets resolved.
    Dreadful. Half a century ago that guy would be managing a concentration camp and love his rose garden. Scum. Just plain scum.

  12. Another reason, as if it were needed, to pay artists directly for their work whenever possible. I am always insanely happy when I am able to do this.

  13. Poor, poor man. Just how does he manage to scrape a living on such a paltry amount? Beats me and, sure as hell, beats the crap out of a lot of other folk as well.

  14. Things like this make things like Bitcoin look more appealing to begin using immediately.

  15. Support live music! No recording involved, so the recording industry misses out on the money.

    1. Support live music!

      Support piracy! It forces live music to be the only way to extract money from consumers.

      2. I came to this conclusion long ago which is why I’m certain that I contributed in no way to this asshole’s paycheck.

        Go fuck yourself record industry… people don’t care about stealing from parasites.

      3. I agree. Unapologetic piracy is the only viable option I’ve ever seen for the ‘future’ of music. And what is that? The ‘future’ of music that people are worried about? As if something so fundamental to human life is going to up and disappear. Now if it’s the future of the ‘music INDUSTRY’ and associated douches well… let’s just call it wheat from the chaff.

  16. That’s why I don’t feel guilty of P2P file sharing. Artist were making a one hit wonder and living off of it for the rest of their lives. Now they must perform and do concerts (work) for their money.

  17. Have any of you ever tried to live off of ramen and nothing but? I did, while being one of those starving musicians you are talking about. Believe me, they would rather you buy them a burger than anything else. Even Jello Biafra made a reporter buy him a couple burgers for the privilege of an interview. That probably had more to do with coming off the benzedrine than anything else, but chances are he was quite broke at the time, having spent all his pocket money on benzedrine. I can’t really give him trash for either, not and keep my integrity. As far as this asswipe’s compensation goes, suing people is good money. Is it so surprising that he makes so much?

  18. Going back to #6 – #8, I’m not here to defend the RIAA, but their job is to “support and promote the creative and financial vitality of the major music companies”, so they are pretty much upfront about their mandate. No surprise then, that the chief is so overpaid.

    But increasingly the major outlets for artists is through Amazon (writers) and iTunes (musicians), and I think it’s worth asking if the grass is much greener on that side of the fence. I’m not sure it is. Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs don’t need to “start lobbying to make massive monitoring & censorship infrastructure a legal requirement in order to protect his profits”, they can just build the monitoring and censorship infrastructure themselves.

  19. Okay, Here’s a thing I’ve always wondered when we do the ‘CEO/CFO/Head Honcho Of Organisation Earns $X million, isn’t that awful!’ song and dance

    How much do people feel /would/ be an appropriate amount for the head of the RIAA to earn in a relatively competitive Head of Big Entertainment Things marketplace?

    And before it happens, the answer ‘Get rid of the RIAA’ isn’t an acceptable one. Because that’s honestly not going to happen at this juncture and they clearly need to pay someone to be in charge of it.

    2. they clearly need to pay someone to be in charge of it.

      meh. In a large enough organization, there’s rarely any reason to have such a figure at all. Especially since there’s probably a board appointed by (or consisting of) industry executives which makes all the decisions anyway, the president is likely a prestige job.

    3. I get your point. I think that $200-$750K is a reasonable amount for a head honcho to make, depending on the size of the honch. I worked at a 1500 person company where the CEO made $500K and I was perfectly fine with that.

      See this graph? http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621/

      That’s a problem. Workers are making less and CEOs are making more. The vast majority of wealth from the last 50 years of productivity increases is going straight to the top.

    4. @ Anon #29

      Okay, Here’s a thing I’ve always wondered when we do the ‘CEO/CFO/Head Honcho Of Organisation Earns $X million, isn’t that awful!’ song and dance

      I personally don’t care how high the pays goes. What I care about is how it was made.

      Customers should be able to pay businesses whatever they’re willing to spend, and businesses should in turn be able to pay what it takes to hire the people they want. In both cases, it’s their money.

      The problems start – and continue to escalate – when regulators and customers fail to hold businesses accountable for lying to their customers and stakeholders. This happens because industry “leaders” use the lobby system to basically write their own regulations, which then inevitably favor them over their less affluent competitors, establishing State-protected monopolies and trusts.

      This corruption nearly toppled the global economy and still the public would rather read bullshit about Charlie Sheen than make their elected representatives work for them instead of the special interests that that can pay for campaign ad spots. Corporations deemed “too big to fail” were handed hundreds of billions of dollars that, if the government was going to spend it at all, should have gone to that people those companies shafted and the employees whose jobs they ended up shedding anyway, not to prop up crooks. The problem isn’t that the fraudsters paid themselves hundreds of millions in compensation; the problem is that the Federal government gave it to them in the first place.

      How much do people feel /would/ be an appropriate amount for the head of the RIAA to earn in a relatively competitive Head of Big Entertainment Things marketplace?

      That’s the point though. The RIAA crushes competition using litigation as an offensive weapon and citing borderline unconstitutional laws that they themselves pushed through Congress on the occasions that they even bother to lobby for restrictive laws, as opposed to simply throwing armies of lawyers at customers and upstart competitors until the latter two are bankrupt or the courts interpret vague existing laws to their advantage. There is nothing competitive about it. In competition there would be no head of the marketplace. There would be heads of companies and the courts would treat them impartially. The technical term is free market, and the entertainment industry, like most major economic sectors, is nothing of the sort.

      And before it happens, the answer ‘Get rid of the RIAA’ isn’t an acceptable one. Because that’s honestly not going to happen at this juncture and they clearly need to pay someone to be in charge of it.

      The RIAA is a carrion eater living on borrowed time. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it will collapse. In the meantime artists and their fans can help hasten that day by not playing the RIAA’s game. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the problem isn’t that Cary Sherman is overpaid. The problem is that he’s got a job as kingpin of entrenched mavens that are suing everyone they can because technology is passing them by and they refuse to adapt to the changing market.

      Last year I was in a local coffee shop with a good friend of mine who’s an independent Persian jazz artist. He was playing his own music on his laptop while we did our work. Over the course of about an hour three people came up and asked him about it. Shortly after the second two (a couple) chatted with him, an older gentleman at a nearby table got up and came over. He handed my friend a business card showing he was a legal counselor for the RIAA and informed us that we had to turn off that music because it was proprietary intellectual property. My friend was turning beet red, so I told the lawyer to go away. When the lawyer threatened legal action, my friend walked over to the shift manager (and his former boss) by the espresso machine and explained that we were being harassed by a stranger. She politely told the lawyer that he was bothering customers and should leave immediately. My friend then told the lawyer he would offer him a CD of his music since he obviously valued it so much, except that the lawyer hadn’t paid him adequate tribute for the privilege. The pest left in a satisfying fury.

      My point being that the RIAA doesn’t just think it owns the music of its labels; it thinks it owns the market.

    5. Well, considering that he has followed the path of his predecessor, Hilary Rosen, in turning the listening public against his client labels, missed the boat badly on digital sales, made false public claims about piracy, and generally cost both his clients and the public millions while ruining the lives of the few defendants who have gone to court, I’d say Sherman should pay back treble damages.

  21. Yeah, those ramen prices might for the six packs rather than individual packs. I just saw 6 packs of ramen for $1 at the grocery store. Buying in enormous bulk like that should be considerably cheaper.

    Thus, you could feed those 45,960 aspiring musicians for half a year on this guys salary.

  22. To quote a wise man:

    “Industry rule number four thousand and eighty,
    record company people are shady.
    So kids watch your back ’cause I think they smoke crack,
    I don’t doubt it. Look at how they act.”

  23. Frank Zappa, “TinselTown Rebellion” –

    “The Tinsel Town aficionados
    Come to see and not to hear
    But then again this system works
    As perfect as a dream
    It works for all of those record company pricks
    Who come to skim the cream!”

  24. I wonder if the musicians they so boastfully defend ever saw anything near that much from the RIAA’s efforts. According to most write-ups I’ve seen they seem to have a difficult time “finding” said artists they are collecting for.

    Its an organization that benefits mainly parasi….err, attorneys and is almost entirely made up OF attorneys. Human garbage.

  25. I wonder if the musicians they so boastfully defend ever saw anything near that much from the RIAA’s efforts.

    Of course not, they don’t defend, care about, or have the musicians best in mind. They really only care about the few mega-labels that are notorious for screwing musicians. The RIAA hurts music way more then it helps.

  26. I’ll remember that compensation package the next time some pinstriped sociopath treats us to another round of crocodile tears over “piracy”. (And yes, this Sherman fella is a rank amateur compared to Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, et. al.)

  27. I’d encourage anyone who thinks the RIAA and their kin are not serious threats not only in the U.S. but to the U.S. to watch this video:

    http://www.youtube.com/user/FuQFalseFlaggers

    The Bill was defeated in its original form, but rest assured your public servants are working hard on revisions. Censorship without due process of the court is Unacceptable.

    https://www.eff.org/coica

    If you are an American and you value the right to dissent from those in power at any given time, do not allow this travesty to become law.

  28. Come on, people. The $3m this lobbyist gets paid is more than double the next lobbyist’s pay, and he’s from the Chamber of Commerce!

    Excess, thy name is RIAA. (or MPAA, or MAFIAA)

    This might even be acceptable to some of us if it meant enriching the arts community in some way.

    Since it doesn’t even do that, it’s easy to condemn an industry that demands harsher punishments than rapists.

  29. Oh come now. We all knew that the RIAA was just another way of making more money from the talent of others. As far as I can tell, it’s a variation on the old mob protection scheme.

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