your opinion on illeagaly downloading music?

i was thinking this morning about how some of steve hacketts newer albums are designed so that they can be listened to on the computer, but the songs cannot be removed. i was thinking that this would probably be good to prevent them losing money to the inconsiderate souls who download their music for free off programs like limewire. But this also prevents them being loaded on my ipod, which is the primary portable listening device. I mean, all mp3 devices, irivers, i pods and anything else that uses a computer to load its music onto it is now useless. If this keeps up, there will be a decline in illeagal downloading, but people will no longer listen to music on their portable music devices, meaning that the musicians will get less listeners. how is this fair? and tell me, is this convoluted or what?

NO

Use Napster instead - at least if you're living in a country where a service like Napster is available, there is no excuse for not using it. And if you happen to own an iPod ... well, you should have thought about that before you bought such a proprietary player.


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - July 25 2006 at 05:59

hackett acolyte wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: NO Use Napster instead - at least if you're living in a country where a service like Napster is available, there is no excuse for not using it. And if you happen to own an iPod ... well, you should have thought about that before you bought such a proprietary player.   everytime you download a song from these programs you take away the artists cd sale. You are STEALING from them. It seems to me that it isnt the right thing to do.

That's just not true. Maybe you should do more research on how these services work?

In a nutshell: Everytime a user *listens* to a track on Napster, this information is made available to the rights holders of the track - usually this is the record company. Napster pays 70-80% of the subscription fees to the record companies, and they can use the playback statistics to forward a part of the money to the artists.

So each time I listen, I'm paying the artist.

and by the way, before i forget, nice avatar, i like the whale.

Illegal downloads suck, they are destroying music and the problem is basically eveyone does it.

FIFTH AMENDMENT!!!

I voted "too convoluted to make opinion"

Without filesharing, I wouldn't be writing this, because I wouldn't have discovered Prog. I download albums to check out an artist. If I like it, I order it or go out and buy it immediately. Lately though, I have been able to decide wheter to buy an album or not without downloading it first, thanks to the free mp3 streaming on this site, a really good initiative!

I am not in favor of illegal downloading, it's a handy way to discover music, but the artists does lose money. One of the main arguments of people who are pro-filesharing is that today's record prices are far too high, however, there are plenty of legitimate online stores where one can buy music (and especially prog, I've found ) at acceptable prices. So with limited free streaming on artist websites, aswell as better information (possibly an advertisement banner on an artist's website) on where to order CDs at good prices, the filesharing could probably be reduced heavily.

I buy mostly used vinyls... AND THE ARTISTS GETS NOTHING!  But I get a cool vintage artifact, which nobody can share via net. As a crime, file sharing is nothing compared when people get stabbed to the face on the streets. Have you seen it ever happen?

Edited by Eetu Pellonpää - July 25 2006 at 10:37

Eetu Pellonpää wrote: I buy mostly used vinyls... AND THE ARTISTS GETS NOTHING!  But I get a cool vintage artifact, which nobody can share via net. As a crime, file sharing is nothing compared when people get stabbed to the face on the streets. Have you seen it ever happen?

This is a great point, as I, too buy a lot of used vinyl.  It's a great way to expand your collection legally at relatively low cost.  However, the artist doesn't see a dime of used record money.

What hasn't the RIAA cracked down on those communist used record store owners??!!??!