Challenging Music Downloading Myths

The BBC is reporting on a study by digital music research firm The Leading Question, which found that people who download music from peer to peer networks paid for four and a half times more music than regular music fans. Also that most of these people "are extremely enthusiastic about paid-for services, as long as they are suitably compelling." What is nice is that the BPI welcomed the findings that not all file sharers are actually evil... they still pledged to carry on the 'carrot and stick' approach though.

Comments

Downloading isn't evil at all.

[Captain Scurvy]

I know it's illegal and that it can possibly hurt artists, but if it wasn't for downloading music illegally, I would have never bothered listening to Michael Buble, would have never bought two tickets to his show, and would have never spent over $200 on merchandise afterwards. So there's a good side to it as well that isn't always as obvious.

Hands up

[BarryNorton]

I don't know about enthusiasm for paid services (sounds a touch rude... though seriously, I used to use eMusic in the days before it became a nightmare, and have never used iTunes or similar), but I am a downloader who's very enthusiastic about music...

I spend as much money as I can afford on CD and vinyl and am completely unapologetic about downloading leaked pre-releases, deleted releases, music I'd consider buying but only after hearing (RIP John Peel, there are fewer and fewer places to do so), and sometimes just music I've not yet the money or time to buy...

Re:Common knowledge.

[JFitzsimmons]

For me: DRM. If I'm going to be paying someone for music, I want it in basically the same flexibility that I would get off a CD. Lossless and with the ability to exercise my fair use. ITMS is completely useless to me if I can't transfer the songs to my portable. And no, there's no way I'm wasting my money on an ipod just so I can carry my DRM tunes around when I already have a perfectly functional portable that I can fill with ripped vorbis or downloaded MP3.

carrots?

[ctnp]

"'...which is why we need to continue our carrot and stick approach to the problem of illegal file-sharing,' he [Philips] said."

  What carrots? All I see are sticks. Are good file-sharers being rewarded at all? Let's see...

  New CD at Best Buy, at a cut-rate price: $12.00

  Paying for an entire CD with 15 songs off of iTunes: $14.85, not including the hidden costs of their DRM.

  It seems all we're getting are sticks and heavier sticks from the recording industry. Yet they think they're being nice by offering to license music for a more expensive price. Fuck them, I'll save my $15 bucks and download free music off archive.org.

Things never change

[rudy_wayne]

While going through some old magazines, I came across a copy of "Modern Recording" from early 1981.

24 years ago, the recording industry was making the same exact claims that they are making today -- they are losing huge amounts of money due to "piracy". Back in those days, personal computers and the Internet were almost non-existant. CDs didn't exist and the main form of recorded music was the vinyl LP. According to the RIAA back then, the villain was cassette tape recorders. People were borrowing their friends albums and recording them onto cassettes instead of buying their own copy.

So, the RIAA commissioned a study that they hoped to take to Congress as proof that they needed tougher laws to deal with this terrible problem. But a funny thing happened. Their study showed that people who had a good quality cassette deck in their stereo sysytem bought nearly twice as many albums as people who didn't.

Sound familiar?

Re:Common knowledge.

[tomstdenis]

And my point is tough shit. You don't need the latest britney spears hit to survive.

A lot of things in life are unfairly priced [one way or another]. Doesn't mean you can just take them when you want.

Whether "piracy == lost sales" or not doesn't really matter. The whole point of a music career is to make a living producing and performing music. If you feel that paying for that is not worth it then you might as well not have professional musicians.

Are the RIAA and labels totally disgraceful? Doesn't matter. That's how they choose to do business.

Know that there are ways of getting good music without going through the RIAA labels. Local bands, indy bands, etc, are out there and if you were soooo concerned with unfair music practices you'd go look for them.

Imagine if all you stupid children spent energy spreading word-of-mouth about indy bands instead of further spreading label music. You'd have a WIDE VARIETY of music to choose from, it wouldn't cost 20$ per CD and you'd be happier.

But no, you're stupid and ignorant and fuel the things you hate the most.

Tom