Find out if your favourite Artist or record label is a member of the Retarded Idiots Association of America.
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).
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.
RIAA Radar
