Some warm to the change, others remain blissfully ignorant

[by Todd] Two similar industries, movies and music, have stories out today that demonstrate just how well one of them gets it. Meanwhile the other can't seem to pull it's head out.

I'm feeling charitable today, so let's start with the good news. ClickZ's Rebecca Lieb reports that Paramount Pictures and Technorati have inked a deal to capture the power of reviews on blog sites to help promote films.

Under the deal Technorati will create a feed of sites it monitors to supply blog snippets to the web site for new Paramount releases. So for An Inconvenient Truth, the feed will appear on ClimateCrisis.net. In keeping true to the nature of blogs, Technorati is supplying only excerpts of quotes, which means visitors to the movie site will be clicking through to blogger sites.

Think the hope of tapping part of that huge audience won't spur hundreds of people to write their own review of the film? Obviously Paramount gets it, check out this comment to ClickZ.

"When you look at what independent film is, it's all about capturing word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is incredibly ephemeral. In the blogosphere, if you can capture all that stuff and have a film site put up a tent and serve as a home or community for that, suddenly the film is visible. This is in essence what we're doing."

The program is brilliant in its simplicity. Everyone has opinions about the movies they see, but seldom are those put to any use. Just ask those I've harangued to see Thank You for Smoking (warning, you can smoke half a pack waiting for the site to load). Now that enthusiasm will have real clout.

Meanwhile, the Recording Industry Association of America (yep, the RIAA) is suing XM Radio over the little device you see to the left, the Inno. The RIAA is ticked because users with XM subscriptions can pluck songs off the air and store them on this device.

In fact, the RIAA is so pissed it wants $150,000 per song snagged by this sucker. Think about that. RIAA is saying that every song stored here is costing them 150,000 downloads on iTunes.

But here's the kicker. Inno doesn't make an MP3 or any kind of transferable file with those songs. In fact, the music goes poof if the user doesn't maintain a subscription to XM.

So what the hell does RIAA want? It looks like the recording industry hasn't come to grips with the fact that many of us are just fine listening to music from sources other than CDs (records for us older consumers). Have you ever seen an industry organization that has fought harder to stifle the enjoyment of its customers than this bunch of morons?