Mr. John Hargrave is truly brillant. His 6 or so pages of documentation on prank phone calling the RIAA and various record companies is very funny.

The Recording Industry Association of America has been making headlines with their recent threat to sue anyone engaged in digital piracy, even my grandmother. Although my grandmother has about 300GB of warez, hackz, crackz, cheatz, pr0n, and MP3s stored away on her nitrogen-cooled dual-RAID systems, she is no thief. She's simply keeping them for a friend.

Still, the RIAA continues to go after innocent file-sharers like my grandmother, who recently got a monster tat of Dr. Dre flipping the bird to a bunch of cops inked across her back. But that's beside the point. The point is that I was trying desperately to get someone in the music industry to take my money. I had called the RIAA, online music stores, and even the music companies themselves.

But what about the artists? They're the bottom of the food chain in the music industry, the musicians that get their cut after the producers, executives, distributors, retailers, and RIAA lawyers take their share. Why not just send some money directly to the bands, and eliminate the middlemob? So that's exactly what I did next: I mailed checks to ten artists, ranging from the mega-successful to the ultra-obscure.