The RIAA says Google doesn't list the sites it likes highly enough on search result pages. Masnick on TechDirt nails 'em to the wall: "For everyone else in the world, if they're not satisfied with how the sites they favor rank in Google, they learn a little something about search engine optimization. But, noooooooo, not the RIAA. They think that it is a requirement that Google be tailored to them directly."

  • teapot

    The RIAA? Isn’t that the group of douches who represent artists whom I steal from guilt-free?

    • That_Anonymous_Coward

      No they represent the labels who are stealing from the artists, committing commercial copyright infringement, not meeting consumer demand, using archaic outdated rules and laws to make sure they can’t access a global market, and generally making everyone else on the planet miserable chasing imaginary dollars while ignoring customers with money in hand.

    • Glen Able

      As I understand it, the RIAA are the “Responsible Investment Association Australasia”.  Perhaps we can lend them a hand with their SEO problem by helpfully linking to their website: http://www.responsibleinvestment.org/

    • http://twitter.com/PeterNGreen Peter Green

      When I worked for Electronics Today International (a hobbyist electronics magazine) in the early 80s, our audio-related articles and projects often mentioned the RIAA equalisation specification for vinyl records. The RIAA were actually a useful technical standards body.

      Thirty years later they are the poster child for mission creep. Where did it all go wrong?

    • Thü Mulder

      Well, they are the ones who steal from the artists and try to break the internet revolution because they are too lazy to try to understand it – their problem with SEO proves it once again. Furthermore, see http://www.ecliptic.ch/stop-copyright-war.html

  • That_Anonymous_Coward

    Headline did not require qualification.

  • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

    Why hasn’t Google bought them already? Cheaper than the ridiculous legal shit.

    • That_Anonymous_Coward

      That whole do no evil promise, without the RIAA around to make Google look like the lesser evil….

  • http://www.nothinginside.net mindysan33

     Kind of off topic, but does anyone know any books/articles on the RIAA that delves into their history? Ones that aren’t hagiographies, I mean? They’ve been around since 52 or 53… there has got to be something about them, right?

    • ldobe

      Just went through an Amazon search for that kind of thing.

      There were only a few categories:
      -PIRATES ARE KILLING THE WORLD ECONOMY
      -The expert’s guide to tubeamps
      -How to make money in the digital age
      -How the digital age has revolutionized the whole universe and everything is different and unknown.

      I’d guess it’s almost all drivel

      • http://www.nothinginside.net mindysan33

         That’s what I discovered, too.  I even looking in academic journals and whatnot, and nothing.  Corporations and lobby groups for corporations are notoriously bad at letting scholars into their archives, in generally. I’m sure this goes double for any group that is even remotely controversial…

    • Antinous / Moderator

      In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy placed a hen’s egg under a toad to see what would hatch, and the RIAA was born.

      It is a bit odd that even Wikipedia doesn’t have any history section for them.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

        So have they really been around since the 1950s, or is that just what they want us to think?  
        Good gods, it really would be easy to build conspiracy theories around them.  Their wealth and power combined with their both evil and frequently inept machinations make them the perfect subject.

        • http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

          They’ve always existed, stop asking questions citizen.

      • http://www.nothinginside.net mindysan33

         Oddly enough, one of the things I’ve thought about doing for my dissertation involves sending in a FOIA on the RIAA to the CIA!  The CIA was giving out money like it was candy in the 50s, especially to cultural organizations. I was wondering if the recording industry tried and managed to get some of that sweet, sweet, candy. I should totally do this, right?

        And to Robert, yes indeed, 1952 is when the organization formed. It was in part I think due to the explosion in sales of phonograms postwar (that’s what I’m suspecting and seeing so far). There was a ’47 article in an academic music journal I read discussing the unexpected boom in sales. I think it might have to do with the the continuing shift around the consumption of music from the site of production (live shows) to… oh, how did Suisman put it?… to the site of consumption? Was that how he put it… It’s in Selling Sounds.  Anyway, I think this is right on the money, and consuming music live apparently waned further after the war (lots of musicians who were coming home had trouble getting live gigs, I keep seeing). 

        But, so many conspiracy theories could weave itself around the RIAA, so very easily…

  • http://twitter.com/theweakend Jarek James

    shoo fly go bother some one like mega

  • http://grumer.org/ Avram Grumer

    Have they spoken to Rick Santorum? He’d probably be sympathetic. 

  • http://www.roadknightlabs.com/blog Dillo

    Well, they(sic) have said “…nothing useful has ever come from the Internet, and nothing ever will”, so this should not surprise them in the least.
    Poor incumbent middlemen, can’t make those roadblocks go back in place.

  • Victor Rajewski

    Even better than SEO: make a product or content that people want. Then it will rise to the top. SEO=you’re doing it wrong.

    • http://www.jocuristrategie.org/ Andrei Daniel

       I agree with you @google-a3c6ce6aad74e51bfaa87dc5ba3f1477:disqus

    • austinhamman

       my thought exactly, since when was SEO considered anything other than exploiting oversights in a well meaning system?

  • tsa

    That shows that even after so many years they still don’t understand anything about the Internet.

  • oasisob1

    Open message from me to the RIAA:
    The more backwards you behave, the less I spend on your products. Right now you are behaving 100% backwards, which translates to a 100% cutoff in the money I spend.
    Knock it off. Join the present and work with your customers, not against them, and maybe you’ll notice the difference.
    Sincerely,
    Me

  • howaboutthisdangit

    Forget the RIAA Curve, now they have the RIAA Attitude.  They will not rest until the Internet has become a paid media distribution channel.

    Like a rabid animal, they cannot be reasoned with, so they must be put down.  Somehow.

  • Fogbert

    Shouldn’t search results be protected under something like editorial discretion? IMO, as long as Google identifies which results are paid results, they should be free to return the results in any damn order they choose. This all seems amazingly baseless.

    I think what’s needed is to somehow get the RIAA and the MPAA into some kind of legal kerfuffle with each other. They could sue each other into oblivion.