Rebranding the RIAA

Lobby group gets the Strategy Boutique treatment

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 15th January 2008 16:07 GMT

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Competition Results Last week, we reported the possibility that the lobby group that represents America's sound recording owners (RIAA) might merge with the global sound recording owners lobby group (IFPI). This raised the awful possibility that the Recording Industry Ass. of America would disappear - making all those "Boycott the RIAA"-type domains useless. Zut alors!

The new organisation obviously needs the full Strategy Boutique treatment. But to begin with, what would it be called? The "Recording Industry Ass. of America" is hard act to follow.

So having lit the joss-sticks, validated our copy-protected whalesong CD against the DRM authentication server, and pressed the "Please Play Please Please" button, we threw the task over to readers.

Sadly, we were deluged by a great deal of vulgarity that can't be printed; the suggestion - "DSSS", or "Different Shit, Same Stink" from Colin Jackson being fairly representative. Too easy. No, the trick is to come up with an entirely plausible name for a trade association.

Time to open a window and light a few more joss sticks.

Sam Bailey got the idea with his two suggestions:

League Of Sound Enforcement Rights Society

And the slightly less plausible:

Trade Of Sound Sharing Evaluation Rights Society

Patrik Olsson suggested:

International Recordings Ass.

While Eddie Edwards offered the extremely plausible:

Worldwide Harmonized Association Towards Charging Universally for Notes, Tunes and Songs

That's much more like it, and it would have won on a good day.

However two really rose to the challenge. Step forward Bela Lubkin, with:

The Association for Human Arts Technologies

(Think about it)

And Adam Foxton for his:

Licensors of Audio Recordings and Devices Association of America

Magnificent. Please step forward gentlemen and sign up for your recoupable cash advance of er, zero. Yes, like the Web 2.0 evangelists, you're expected to produce creative works of genius for free: it's the future of music.

Ass. HAT and LARD Ass. it is, then.

Who do you want to rebrand next? ®

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