Everyone who listens to music needs to READ THIS!

[jp11]

36. What I didn't see or saw little of

in that really long piece was the issue that people take more than they'd consume/use or actually buy when it is free. Call it what you will and I'm sure there is some name for it.

When you don't have to make a choice between things and can have them all why not do so? I think virtually no one who has that many songs would actually buy them all, ever. Even if you could get them used for half price or buy them cheap then resell them so the total cost was close to 25-35% of retail hardly anyone would do it. Not even if you could remove the burdens of having to physically handle all those cd's and rip them to a computer.

Right there is a basic flaw in this 'stealing deprives artists/labels of money' because the very large majority of people WOULD NOT buy them if they were not available for free. Thus there is very little stealing in that equation, would they buy something I'm sure they would but not nearly as much as many of them take. It doesn't excuse it but it does deflate that argument that everything acquired is stolen and a direct sale 'lost'.

I see little in regard to the vast increase in the number of artists, yes more people can produce albums so record sales probably take a hit from that in some aspect. Does it cover the decline over the years, highly unlikely that it does, what about the way the RIAA fought tooth and nail against moving into the next century with digital music? Or how about the way they went after kids, college students, etc not just to stop them but punish and make examples of them. Suing for millions dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars when at most the cost of the IP was in the range of a few thousand dollars or low tens of thousands of dollars? Some forced to take pleas, with heavy fines, over facing the huge court costs and even harsher penalties of the lawsuit should they lose.

There is also no mention of all the other things that have changed in the last 10-15 years. People can listen to most of the albums they used to buy through music videos online, create a playlist on youtube and you have many of the songs you'd buy free. Video gamers ranks have swelled so that just listening to music isn't as popular as it once was. Those are just a couple of examples in addition to the increase in the number of artists that are now able to put out their material who don't need a label to do so as they did 15+ years ago that probably hurt commercial record sales as well.

The writer asks 'how hard is it to use itunes or enter your password' and says it isn't 'their job to make it easy' except that is exactly their job. If you want people to pay for the content you sell when it is available FREE elsewhere you need to not make doing so a PIA, you need to not put restrictions on your customers that actually punish them for supporting you and doing the right thing. Itunes is actually still 'new' when compared to file sharing and I can't speak to how well it was stocked at launch(10 years ago) or the pricing then but consider that before Itunes opened up there were numerous other alternatives that were free and fully stocked with whatever you wanted no registration no limits on what they had. They, Itunes, only recently like the last 3 years removed many of their DRM restrictions.

Even today many digital albums still cost as much as the physical copy which has material costs and has to be transported/handled to be sold. While that cost isn't all that high it should reduce the price for a digital product absent the physical media.

With some of the content delivery systems you actually don't own the thing you bought you are granted a license and *if* they want they can revoke that while keeping your money. It hasn't happened much as I recall the only instance that comes to mind is a book that Amazon pulled, people who bought it had it wiped from their accounts. But the way they want it is you don't own these things you just have 'use' of them for as long as they allow you to do so. That might be fine but the power is not in your hands as the consumer who purchased the item/thing/IP because they redefined what you were buying.

None of this excuses not paying artists for the work they make and you benefit from. People have a right to make a living and should be paid for their efforts but things aren't as black and white as a great deal of the anti-piracy/copyright infringement arguments try to make them out to be.