A couple of months ago, Toby Keith was interviewed in Playboy magazine. And his position on MP3s and downloading is that there's not much he can personally do to stop it ... and that he's making out quite well as it is. But if he was struggling to make ends meet on his music career? He'd be pissed that someone was pirating copies of his songs over the internet instead of buying his CDs. That's his art & his livelihood ...
MP3s
by somebody 16 Replies latest social entertainment
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ballistic
Whether it is legal depends on whether the music is copyrighted and the copyright laws in the country where you live. If you've been downloading copyrighted music in the US, then you have been doing it illegally. But don't worry - we wont tell anyone!
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ballistic
To be honest, I think many of the stories in the press about people being caught downloading are scare tactics. In the Uk, there are millions of downloaders and only 12 prosecutions to my knowledge. These are probably mass uploaders or site owners blatently offering http downloads.
P.S. what music are you looking for? I have ways and means to send it to you - and if it's not too obscure - I probably have it!
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Simon
Anyone remember when nobody complianed when we taped songs off the radio with cassettes and copied cassetes that other friends bought? I don't understand what the difference is. Nobody got sued by artists for doing it! Artists were actaully HAPPY to hear that their talent was so widely spread and counted that for good ratings.
The problem for the record co's now is that mass distribution of digital copies is possible. A tape of a tape of a tape quickly becomes crap quality so there was a limit to it being a big issue to record companies (and they got a cut from the sales of blank tapes anyway to cover it).
Personally, I think artists should bypass all the middle-men (record companies and retailers) and sell their wares directly on the internet. The record companies have the most to loose and have put themselves where they are because of laziness and greed. By this I mean that they have failed to search for and promote proper talent and instead just churn out copies of the current fad (boy bands etc) and also overcharge for their product when they could (CDs) so that a big market for MP3s was generated. If CDs had been cheaper and music downloads resonably priced I doubt the boon in piracy would have been quite as it has been.
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squinks
I haven't finished reading all the posts on this yet, but personally I don't mind paying for my MP3 tunes. The songs are somebody's work and I wouldn't want any body taking my work and not paying me for it.
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DanTheMan
I can't see why I should have to pay almost the same amount of money to iTunes for a song as what it costs to get it on a CD at Best Buy, when I don't get the cover art, I don't get anything physical, and the file itself contains approximately 1/8 the information as on the CD. Also, why should I pay the same amount of money for a Dio song from 1982 as I do for the cool new Beck song?
CD's are chock full of noxious chemicals and are manufactured in plants that burn god knows how much coal (I know, it's probably a drop in the ocean, but still) and for this reason I am an exclusive downloader now, and I think that if the music industry had a clue they would figure out that CD's are going the way of the dinosaur in a hurry, the sooner they can phase them out completely and come up with a workable business model for selling music over the internet, the better. And they need to accept the fact that the internetization of the recorded music biz is not going to increase their profits, sorry guys but the days of selling $15 CD's with two or three good songs are *over*, fewer and fewer people are willing to do that nowadays, and this trend will only increase.
I have no objections to paying for song downloads, goofy Gen-Y rhetoric about music needing to be "free" in the mystical sense of the word makes me retch. Studio time, producers, instruments, etc., all costs big-time $$$$.
I think that, as people's hard-drive capacity grows ever larger, iTunes and the others should double or even triple the file sizes, either that or drastically cut the price of songs, or put them on a pricing schedule that follows the time-tested principle of supply and demand, instead of a flat price for every song regardless.
Just my $.02
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Leolaia
Simon....Actually, the majority of digital copies in mp3 format are in inferior quality compared to CDs. I usually buy the actual CD or CD single the song is on anyway (if it's a song I really want), because I don't like the sound quality in the mp3 version available online, even through iTunes or Napster (which is not at a high enough bitrate for my taste).
One of my favorite musical groups, Metric, has said in an interview that they don't mind fans file-swapping their songs, because in their case they had a whole album that went into limbo because their record label went belly up. The only way to get these songs (as well as earlier demos) is to download them from other fans. Because they only have one album and one EP out, that accounts for about half of Metric's musical output. And it is through hearing all these songs that many ppl become fans, because those are awesome songs, and indicates the true breadth of style that the group has. Yet I hope very much for the songs to be officially released on CD, because some of them are available only in crap 128 kb quality.