New adventures in hi-fi

[JackSpratts]

He recently filled up the iPods of everyone who worked on REM's new album with songs that he thought they might like - and considering iPods can take up to 10,000 songs, this was a Herculean feat of downloading. "He's become obsessed with it," says Stipe. "He has done this for everyone who worked on our new record, including the engineers, who he had only known for a couple of weeks. What's interesting is to discover what he thinks we should be listening to. Mike got entire albums by Miles Davis, for example, while I only got the greatest hits. It must have taken him weeks."

and it must have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars since he paid for every single track times every single person.

right.

this is a guy whose gigantic multinational foreign owned record company is the major part of the riaa and is at this very moment actively prosecuting regular american people for doing the exact same thing but ironically on a smaller scale than r.e.m.'s buck. if he didn’t pay for the hundreds of thousands of tracks he handed out to his friends, co-workers and employees he should leave his label in protest of the riaa’s outrageous behavior. björk’s producer does this new kind of "edutainment downloading," so does just about everyone making music today; leaving scant evidence that anyone in the [alice in] wonderland they call a recording industry even begins to grasp this legal issue.

- js.