Illegal Music Downloading

[Lord Grendel]

I agree with some of your points Dairenn, but no matter what the labels are not doing right by their artists. I have never heard One complaint when we all change media, and buy the same albums over and over again. They don't do any marketing, the division of revenue is still Heavily weighted in their favor, and they retain control over the artists content.

For new artists I agree it is difficult to get started, I have already said as much a few pages back. For those of us that have been loyal to our bands for decades I have no guilt taking a 5.1 copy of DSOTM by Pink Floyd whatsoever. I have bought that album 6 times over the years, and still the band doesn't get the price of a single CD from all those sales.

The average split is between 12% and 15% of the royalties the artists collect from a sale.

So if it's $10.00 a CD for example after paying for legal copies for years, the band still only gets, $7.20 from all those sales.

Meanwhile back at the Greed is Good record company they have pocketed a cool $52.80 from those sales, and they did No marketing at all, just the cost of printing the CD's/DVD's which is not that expensive.

This is a complex issue, and my major disagreement is with the shoddy treatment of the artists themselves, if the major labels go under, then I hope someone comes up with a far more equitable arrangement than the one they are using now, I call it the "Capone" business model.

[Mr. Shadow]

Originally Posted by Dairenn

Given how cheap, easy, faster and higher quality legal downloads are, it's not worth the chance that like I (or my neighbor accidentally) gets sued by the RIAA. Since they're using IP addresses (incorrectly) to personally identify people, you don't want to wind up like that one single mother who didn't even know what an MP3 was getting sued to the tune of a few hundred grand because someone was using her non-password protected Wi-Fi connection to the Internet with a laptop stuck out the window.

If you consider yourself against stealing in general, then you're probably against illegally downloading music. Intellectual property is given that designation due to the time/effort/money used to produce the material in question. There is a reason the concept of copyrights actually appears in the US Constitution; the dudes who wrote that were pretty smart.

Then there is the matter of material that is out of print and has been, for intents and purposes, abandoned due to the perceived lack of commercial viability. While the majority of illegally pirated music is Top 40 garbage that DOES make the labels a lot of money, there are some MP3s floating around of music that is basically impossible to find. Not every town has a small, local record store specializing in out of print vinyl and cassettes. Websites on the Internet have helped with things like this, but they're not the ones the RIAA or the IFPI are talking about being the major pariah the way Napster and now The Pirate Bay are.

One might be able to mentally justify it by saying, "well, I'll buy tickets to this artists' concerts, which is where they make most of their money anyway." But from the perspective of the artists and their representatives, there's no way THEY can account for who's really doing that. No other business works that way. "Well, I'm going to walk out of your dealership with car stereos, but I promise to buy that really expensive car you're trying to sell, because that's where you're going to make most of your money anyway." That just seems silly. In fact, one could argue that the losses taken by the stolen music eventually offset any gain in supposed, future-promised concert tickets.

They aren't suing any new people. They were losing too many cases and most little violations cost more to prosecute than any possible return.