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U.S. Investigating Online Music Pricing
An anonymous reader writes "Times Online has a story about the U.S. Federal Government investigating whether the music labels are fixing prices for online music sales. 'The antitrust division is looking at the possibility of anti-competitive practices in the music download industry ... Mr Jobs suggested such a move would drive owners of Apple's iPod, the hugely popular digital music player, to piracy, a problem that has cost the music industry billions in revenues in recent years.'"
"piracy, a problem that has cost the music industry billions in revenues in recent years.'"
I don't buy it one bit. I always find comments/stats like this to be funny. How does that go again, 76.34% of stats are made up?
Whos to say that Redneck Billy Bob would really have paid for that Britney Spears album that had the song that he pirated? Or that your great aunt Ethal, really would had bought that Iron Maiden album from that song she pirated?
I think these numbers are grossly exaggerated and most likely, just made up. How are you to statically calculate a loss of a non-material product that you are "assuming" someone "would have" purchased legally?
The RIAA and MPAA need to get knocked off their little soap box and stop preaching their bullshit. It isn't like they aren't making enough money as it is, those fat cats pockets just keep getting bigger. Not to mention, established artists are not hurting either. The people that are getting hurt buy this are the struggling artists, that the music industry is already raping as it is. But do you hear these stuggling artists bitching, no, most of them are not. Most of them realize the more people that can hear the music, the more fans they are going to get. True fans that will buy their albums and support them.