Last Monday, the music-licensing agency Broadcast Music Inc. filed a lawsuit against an Indiana karaoke bar. What?! Not only have the blood sucking labels brought lawsuits against 12-year-old computer “pirates,” now they have decided to drain the pockets of small sing-along bars.
This is the last straw. I can’t believe these “businesses” have the audacity to say people are costing them money just by singing along to their songs. Maybe I should stop singing in the shower. Or better yet, maybe my friends and I should refrain from all car-ride sing-alongs.
This latest charge brought by BMI only goes to show just how much record labels don’t care about their customers. It seems that record labels have declared war on the same people they want to buy their albums.
Listed in the lawsuit as a plaintiff is the trust for Sonny Bono. Okay, so now they’re using a dead man to sue people. How much of a problem can the late Mr. Bono have with a drunken plumber singing “I Got You Babe” in a bar?
If you ask BMI, a song is nothing more than a means for them (and the artist) to make a profit, not a means for marking milestones in peoples’ lives. So ignore the significance of the song that played after the birth of a family’s first child or the song you heard when you met your significant other. I’m glad they cleared that up for me.
I have a solution to the “us versus the world” mentality of the record labels: I’ve resolved to not buy another CD from the ungrateful jerks and sing my heart out at all karaoke bars. Not only that, but I intend to tell my kids not to buy any CDs. Now, if I can get one billion people to repeat this practice four billion times, the greedy record companies would all go bankrupt.
I’ll tell you what else I intend to do; I’ll just burn copies of my friends’ music and wait for BMI to sue me for that as well.
Garrison Vereen,24, is a senior public relations from jacksonville. he is the deputy copy desk chief for The Famuan and can be reached at garrisonvereen2@hotmail.com