Will piracy kill off prog rock ?

Sometimes I despair at how narrow thinking can get around here.

If a 10,000 people stole from Lead Zeppeling it wasn't going to hurt them when they were on their way to selling 37 million copies of   ... As you say, they did just fine. Peter Grant would probably have ripped your thieving arm off and beaten you to death with the soggy end, but you know, it was just business... he was hard man, vicious but fair.

But if 100 people steal from (say) Pseudo/Sentai that's a different matter, they are not on their way to selling 37 million copies of their CD, so that's $500 missing from Greg's bottom-line. And that's not fine at all.

In so many ways that is total bollocks. This is not Robin Hood who only steals from the rich situation. Piracy knows no boundaries, once the mentality of "All Labels Are Bad" sets in then those that download will steal from everyone and anyone. There is no moral dilemma being played out here, there is no redressing of a perceived social-economic imbalance

Utter rubbish (well, that part of it that I could understand was... the rest... incoherent).

Record companies are not monsters, they are a business. The purpose of a business is to make money, selling music is how they do that. A record label is not a public service, it is a factory for making a product. You may not like the idea of "Art" as a commodity but that is how it has always been, you make something and sell it, simple commerce - that's how it works, it worked for Mickey Angelo, it worked for Johnny Seb Bach and it worked for Billy S Burroughs - even worked for Vinney van Gogh who would barter paintings for a bowl of bouillabaisse at the Café du Tambourin. If you can sell your art you can eat.

The way music companies works seems unfair and in some ways it was, but not in every way. The label funded the recording and production, it paid for the manufacture and distribution and recouped that outlay on sales. If the record didn't sell they lost money... the company lost money not the artist, who invariably kept the advance (ie a loan in advance of sales) the company paid them. That lost money came from the profits they made on all the successful albums they also made. Mike Oldfield (bless his cotton socks) paid for all the albums made by Clearlight, Slapp Happy, Jabula and all those other Virgin artists who didn't sell thousands of albums. That was tough on Mr Oldfield (bless his cotton socks) but it was great for Cyrille Verdeaux, Dagmar, Madumetja Ranku and many other musicians who got to record their albums because Virgin gave them a chance, all thanks to Mikey "O" (bless his cotton socks). Bad business decisions... you betcha, but what great music as a result of that.

Today it doesn't work like that because we broke the music business, now the music business couldn't give a flying fart about esoteric music and niche markets like Prog because we broke it. Now the artist has to pay for everything, up front and out of their own pocket, the modern equivalent of the record label (Bandcamp, Soundcloud) pays for nothing. What do we get for that? Artist integrity? Think again. Every musician needs to eat