[Recording Industry Association of America president Hilary] Rosen alternately sounded like the captain of the Titanic asking, "Iceberg? What iceberg?" and George Orwell's double-speaking Big Brother stubbornly insisting, "Black is white." She maintained that RIAA surveys prove that consumers do not object to the average CD price pushing the $20 mark, and that federal anti-trust laws are actually bad for consumers, since they are slowing the record companies down from banding together to institute technical "improvements" that will stop us from making duplicate copies of our own CDs.

By far Rosen's most absurd contention was that record companies create artists, not the other way around. "The artist's image is created by the money that the label puts into it," she said.