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.
How do you use it?
Add the RIAA Radar bookmarklet to your bookmarks/favorites list. (A bookmarklet is a piece of JavaScript stored inside a bookmark. You use it just like any other bookmark.) To install RIAA Radar, right-click on the link below, and select "Add to Favorites..." (I assure you it's safe.) You can also simply drag the link to your Links toolbar. Go to their web site for the actual bookmarklet.
- Go to any album's detail page on Amazon.com you would like to check.
- Click the "RIAA Radar" bookmark!
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 GMOs? 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 list 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. (See the list.)
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 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.
How does it work?
When you run the RIAA Radar from an Amazon album detail page, it uses Amazon Web Services to get the album information. It then checks the record label data of the Amazon item against a database of the current list of RIAA members, and returns the result.
Source: http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/