I read a statistic that said that approximately 700,000 songs are illegally downloaded every five minutes, meaning every day, about 201,600,000 songs are illegally downloaded. Do you think it's okay? Have you ever thought about doing it, or have done it yourself? I mean what implications does this have for the music industry? If no one is actually buying music, how will that affect the music industry? We all know that 201 million is a lot, and that number is only going to get bigger. Do you think CD's are just...outdated? Like records or cassettes? What's the next step the music industry has to take?
I'm completely fine with downloading music. Consider this: When you buy that shiny new Katy Perry cd at Walmart, you give the cashier a shiny new 10 dollar bill. Of that, about $5 goes to Wal Mart's profit, because they bought the CD from Capitol Records for about $5. So Capitol (Warner Brothers) pulls in $5. Then they hand a shiny new one dollar bill to Katy Perry. A whole dollar! Wicked! That's wonderful if you're planning on selling a million records. But if you aren't..... Your band has 4 members, you sell 100k copies, you each make 25k. Pretty garbage if you're only going to put out an album every few years. Now consider this: You go see the band in concert for 20 bucks. You buy a t-shirt for 20 bucks. You buy some weed. The band makes a lot of money there. T-shirt sales are almost all profit. Concert tickets make good profit too. The drug dealer only makes a few dollars on the weed you bought. The moral: Don't be the drug dealer. What i'm getting at with this silly little narrative is that I don't feel bad about downloading music at all. A lot of artists support it, because it gives a chance for bands who normally wouldn't have as many people listening to them to get exposure. Gets people coming to shows, dropping money there. There are a few bands that I've dropped a lot of money on. Brand new I've dropped at least 300 bucks on concert tickets and T-shirts. If i'd bought their 3 CDs, i'd have given them 3 shiny dollars.
Another thing to add : If you didn't have the option to illegally download a song, how many times are you actually going to go out and buy the CD? How many times does someone download a song instead of going out and buying the CD?
I'm guilty for the most part. Just because a CD has around 14 tracks and it costs a lot more than it's worth in my opinion. If I really like the music, meaning the majority of them in the album, then I will buy it. Not to mention some music don't get put on CDs. LOTS of them. So I just rely on downloads. I mean if I didn't have the option, I probably won't buy a lot of CDs. I guess our parents made it through that stage They have a lot of ghetto stuff, but they don't listen to new things. They always listen to those same things over and over. When I was little and didn't know much about downloads though, I went and bought a CD only because there were more than a few songs I liked from one artist, and I would find the album and hope that i'll like the rest.
Hehe my parents are the same way. My mom has this quite large CD collection, but she has nothing from the last 4-5 years. And my dad can listen to the same CD for days on end. I don't know how they do it x_x
Until I got my own laptop [around 3 years ago] I used to buy all my CDs I would spent hundreds of dollars on CD's that only really contained one or two good songs. Then I started downloading using Limewire, which isn't the best if you wanted to download a whole album. I then moved into Torrents, which may take longer to download depending on the size but I would be able to get full Discographies from my favorite artists like: Red Hot Chili Peppers. Recently however I feel like supporting the artists and I have found myself buying their albums on iTunes. I'm embarrassed to say but I'm a huge fan of Britney Spears and I totally bought her new album. Sadly I have a total of 8000 songs, maybe only 900-1000 of them were bought. So I say if I really feel the need to support the artist then I go buy their album. CD's are easy gifts I find if the person tells you what they like, but now with all the downloading no one wants CD's anymore.
I think if a person can regulate how much they download then yes I think it alright to download. The thing I don't like is how there RIAA is actually sueing these kind of people now. Whether they're small time people or 15 thousand songs! I mean there's always going to be a way to work around it. I think instead of artists sueing their customers they need to try to come up with either cheaper CD's or get more money from the stores!
While it is true that the artist makes almost nothing off of an album sale, if I don't think it's worth seeing them in concert, then they aren't going to end up getting any monies from me...I generally dl all my music and then go back and buy the cds that I enjoy. Basically, I use dling just to explore new genres and figure out what albums are worth spending some money on.
I download all my music. You always hear that when you dl music for free, you're not supporting the artist, and they won't be able to make any more music. Like Hally said, though, when you buy an album, you're really supporting the recording company, and I don't really care too much about them.
You guys raise some good points. I wonder if there is anyone here who is against pirating music. It'd be interesting to hear what they had to say.
i use limewire, which im pretty sure is pirating because it is free. i have no problem with doing it, although i do feel slightly guilty for the artists, because we are ripping them off for their money. for my favourite artists, though, i actually purchase their music.. because i love them.
Plus I think if all these artists are against people downloading their music maybe they'd ought to be fighting the record companies instead of us! I mean I don't understand sometimes why record companies even make the amount of money they do. Guess it's just part of the system.
pirating music is fine. you're asking me to pay a dollar for a song when i have 1000+ songs in my library? give me a break
Or going out to buy a 12 dollar CD just for one song. Plus if it's a rare CD that you have to spend time looking for, the whole thing just gets even more daunting.
You know another thing that came to my mind is how this whole illegal downloading thing is nearly unpublishable, merely because of the mass scale that it's on. I mean how are they gonna catch people and punish them? Are they going to arrest every person who has ever illegally downloaded a song? No.
I download music. Mainly because the music I like is hard to find. I know I shouldn't... it's basically stealing. I think the majority of people are guilty though.
It's certainly punishable, but because so many people do it, they only punish a very very very very small percentage of offenders. I don't remember where you are from, but especially on University campuses in the USA where all of the students use the university's internet service, there are always a few really big lawsuits each year. None of my friends have ever gotten in real trouble, but a few have gotten warnings from the RIAA or Universal Studios for illegally dling movies and tv shows and such...it happens, be careful
-Quickly hides my phone- I think its okay as long as you still go out and actually buy a CD once and a while and not download 50,000 sounds, thats where it gets to be too much. If you download say 50 songs total than Its alright by me I suppose.
But where do you know where to draw the line? Why 50? Why not 100? Why not 1000? It's all very subjective from that viewpoint.