Downloading Music

[Gil-Galad12]

Being an aspiring musician myself, I must say I am strongly against the illegal downloading of full albums. Samples to hear what the music is like is fine, but entire songs and albums hurts the artists themselves more than the labels.

It is morally wrong from a Christian view as well, because it IS stealing. It is no different than walking into a CD shop and slipping the latest disc from your favorite artist under your coat and walking off with it.

Larger artists may not be hurt as bad by the MP3s (Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, etc.) but it strongly affects bands any smaller than that.

The CD sales are very important to a small artist like myself. I would make most of my money off of the sales. Playing shows costs to much for small musicians... hiring a PA and sound guy, promoting the show (which would probably attract 30 people paying $5 a ticket), etc. Every show I would play produces an aproximate loss of about $1200.

I could not afford to play shows without album sales... and it gets more complicated..

The record labels pay for a band to release an album... which say thay pay for 500,000 copies of the album to be released, and only 356,298 albums are sold, then the ARTIST has to pay the record label for every single album that was printed and not sold. BIG money problems...

So please, if you download music, do it only to check out an artist/album and then purchase the album depending on if you enjoy it. If you cannot do THAT much for the artist then please, support them in some way, attend a show, buy some merchandise, anything... life for a rock n' roll star nowadays ain't peachy unless you're selling 5x platinum albums.

That's strange that you say that, because I and most of the people I know will pay the less than 10 bucks it costs for a really good independent album to support an awesome band, and I don't lose any sleep over the fact that stupid artists like Britney Spears and whoever else is in the Top 10 might be losing money.

 

[TheDandyMan]

Do you just skip all that Downloading music now and just go out to cd stores and buy your cds from your favorite bands or artists?

If only you could find pony express and starflyer 59 in stores. I normally have to hunt stuff down on the Internet.

 

[heathen chemistry]

i download and burn songs onto minidisc cos i'm that much cooler.

 

[knuckle50]

i download a lot more than i used to. open source and open networks are the furture. not even the huge corporations can take that away from us. i download about 10 songs a day, i have over 800, and i havent bought a cd in 7 years. everything you hear about the riaa prosecutng you... dont worry about it. the chance is like one in 23 billion. it is exaggerated by the self-serving corporate media as a favor to the riaa to stop people from downloading.

 

[ptsofathrty]

I download music mainly because I can't really aford paying hundreds of dollars just for about 10 cds. 18 or 20 dollars per cd is a lot when you plan to buy maybe 20 cds. The record company isn't losing all that much money nor are they really losing that many record sales. 400,000 copies is quite a few in my mind. I don't feel to guilty when they're making millions and I don't have any money. I do buy a cd if it is one that I really like, but for me I don't always want all 15 or 20 songs, maybe only 1 or 2. If they priced the cd in comparison to how many songs are included, I wouldn't feel so disgusted with the prices. (99 cents per song would be fine; like iTunes and Napster) I'll still download - IT'S FREE!