Quote:
Originally Posted by TheSlyMoogle
Double TAP!
Music: I listen to a lot of music... A lot. I think the music industry however is severely flawed and stubborn. They were the first of the big entertainment industries to run into this problem. Small files, easy to rip a CD, and easy to transfer the files to friends or to just give them your CD so they could do it. You'll be hard pressed to find someone these days who doesn't own an MP3 player of some type whether it be specifically for music or if it's a function of their phone. They were so silly and stubborn for years, and approached the piracy issue with an iron fist instead of embracing digital media, and coming up with a way to profit from it. Eventually Apple did, but by then I think perhaps it was a little too late.
However I don't feel bad about stealing music. Why? Well for the most part I feel like very little of the money I spend is probably going to the artist themselves. I'm sure most of the profit goes to the label, and i should hope by now that youtube has proven that you don't need the promotion you would get from a record label to be successful. The next reason is... If you find an artist on my iPod more than likely I have been to a concert they put on and used the money I didn't spend on their CD, to go see them in concert, where I generally buy an over-priced t-shirt to remember the event with, and if for some reason they serve alcohol I usually buy an over-priced beer too (Well since I turned 21 anyway). If I haven't seen an artist or band in concert it's because either I missed their tour or they stopped performing, or it's some shitty pop song that I just have the 1 song from them. You might say "Well John, you could just pay a dollar and get that 1 song on itunes" Fortunately I don't download shitty pop songs anymore anyway because thanks to youtube I can listen there, for free, as much as I want for a day or 2 and then that song is usually something I never want to hear ever again.
There are already services available with a small monthly fee that allow you to basically listen to any song you want to hear in certain settings, like your computer, phone and think even some cars now. Stuff like the pay services for Pandora and such. I feel that hopefully it wont be long before there will be services that allow you to just pay a fee for amount of music downloaded or whatever, and it's cheap. Like 10 dollars to download as much as you want in a month? I mean that's honestly fair, and guess what? It happens already, but I guarantee you most people would do something like that. I know I would jump on it for 120 dollars a year to get as much music as I wanted, because it's a price I feel is fair, and it's something I already do anyway.
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I'm going to try to stick to mostly music here, as that is a field I'm involved with. First of all, I believe Rhapsody already has that type of service you describe.
http://www.rhapsody.com/welcome.html $10 a month, supposedly for any song you'd ever want. Honestly, I have no idea if this is actually good or not, I just happened to see a commercial for it the other day...
As for myself, I pirate music and my music is pirated. I suppose that's kind of how I justify it. I think "oh, well, people do it to me, why can't I do it?" I admit it's not much of a justification. If anything, I should know that it has completely affected and roughed up the music industry, so I shouldn't do it. But in the end, I'm a poor musician, so I download stuff or get it from friends because I can't really afford to buy CDs like I used to.
Anyway, that's also my general reaction to other people downloading our music. I can't really stop it, and I figure that more people are going to hear our music if they can get it for free than if they have to pay for it. If a percentage of those people ends up coming to a show and buying a T-shirt, well than that's pretty good. We've even had people come to our show specifically saying that they've downloaded our music. A lot of times those people will then directly buy a CD from you at the show, which is really the best profit margin for the band. However, as a whole, piracy has certainly turned the music industry into something else. Vinyl is coming back which is interesting...I think the music industry is finally trying to work out the digital marketplace and make it work, but they should have started way earlier...It's a crazy business, but you just have to put out good songs and hope that people like it and maybe someone pays you to put your song in a commercial. That always helps.