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What is RIAA Radar? The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). How do you use it? 1. You can search for artists, albums, and record labels. 2. Install a RIAA Radar Greasemonkey script. As you're browsing around Amazon.com, the results will show up right on the pages as you're browsing around. 3. Use the RIAA Radar Indie 100 and Amazon Top 100 to help you find new music. There are also more top 10 lists broken out into genres to help you find what you like. 4. Use the "Find similar RIAA-free albums" link next to any search result to find up to 10 RIAA-free alternatives to the albums you know you like. Why should I use it? Just as people can currently find out where some products come from and who made them (Is this banana organic? Does this milk contain growth hormones? Were these clothes made in a sweatshop?), it is important to have that knowledge for as many consumer goods as possible. Knowledge is power, and knowing where the product came from can (and should) influence what you buy. The RIAA is a group of several hundred record labels. The roster of members changes constantly (major labels create new subsidiary labels, popular artists are given their own labels, artists or labels leave the RIAA due to creative or political differences, etc.) and it is almost impossible to keep track. Aside from memorizing the entire list, or having the list available and checking it while shopping, it is hard to know who is a member and who is not. Why is it important to know if an album was released by an RIAA member or not? That's possibly a fairly long answer, but just the highlights of the RIAA's practices involve price-fixing, blaming its poor financial state on unfounded digital piracy claims (and in turn, blaming and suing its own consumers), lobbying for changes that hinder technological innovation and change copyright laws, underpaying the artists it represents, invading personal privacy to enforce copyrights, and dismantling entire computer networks just because of their ability (of their users) to share copyrighted files. (Feel free to visit the RIAA and Boycott-RIAA.com to learn more!) In order to successfully and efficiently support who you like (or not support who you don't like), you need to have information immediately available to know who is who. The RIAA Radar works in two ways: if you're looking to stop buying RIAA releases, it will help tell you what albums to avoid (or purchase secondhand); if you are looking for new music or new alternatives, it works to promote non-RIAA releases by providing similar RIAA-free albums to almost any RIAA release, and RIAA-free popularity charts for several genres in order to showcase viable alternatives. How does it work? When you run the RIAA Radar, it uses Amazon Web Services to get the album information. It then checks the record label data given by Amazon against a local database based on the official list of RIAA members (but heavily added to beyond that), and returns the result based on a match. What if the RIAA Radar result is incorrect? Since the album data is not ours, and the RIAA member listings are terribly inaccurate and erroneous, it is possible that the Radar may return incorrect results. We do not claim that the data or the Radar results to be 100% correct, but we use a lot of user information and double-checking to make sure the application is as accurate as it can be by itself. The application should be used to help your purchasing research, not be it. The RIAA Radar does not hold or own any of the album data, so we cannot change any of it except the result that comes up based on the record label given by Amazon. If you see a Radar result that you think is incorrect, there is a link next to every result which you can submit an item for review. The label info page lists popularly disputed labels, and the background information as to why a label shows up with a particular result on this site. Comments, corrections, or suggestions? Feel free to leave questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions in e-mail to ben@magnetbox.com. | |
RIAA Radar News & Notes:
Please check the label info page before you submit any correction. It lists all known disputed labels and the background information as to why a label shows up with a particular result.
Help foot the bill:
This site is created and maintained by one guy, who also pays the hosting bill. Please donate via PayPal if you like and/or use the site.
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