"You Can't Mandate Cultural Change"

The Recording Industry Association of America isn't the most popular organization in the music business these days. In fact, they're becoming one of the most hated, even by the artists whose work they are "protecting" from piracy. This "protection" has manifested itself over the past several years by hundred-thousand and multi-million dollar lawsuits with people who have downloaded music. Cary Sherman, the president of the RIAA's board of directors, is seen as the face of the lawsuits.

He recently admitted that their approach has failed to change a culture of downloading pirated music. I think pretty much everyone would agree with him on that. However, it brings up an interesting discussion. How deeply entrenched in our culture is pirated downloading? Sure, the RIAA miserably failed to turn the culture off to the option, but is it even possible to change the culture? The accessibility of pirated music certainly has increased greatly over the past few years, making its usage more widespread. But what does this mean for artists who want to "break" – to make it as a full-time artist? Is the future of music really just piracy?

Will Gray has been working on a documentary called Broke*, which addresses some of these very topics. As a side note, I saw Will in concert for the second time last week, and he is one of the most musically diverse, fresh, and talented artists that I've seen in a long while. How many artists can have both hip-hop songs played with folk instrumentation and a beautiful Patty Griffin cover with Buddy Miller playing guitar – and everything sound great? Very very very few. Anyway, here's the documentary for Broke*. Check it out.

Broke* Trailer (in production) - http://www.brokedoc.com from Mindfree Entertainment on Vimeo.