Coming from a musician, people who refuse to buy music are killing music. Bands don't make much money these days off of album sales, instead, it's all concerts. But if they are signed to a record deal, they won't play concerts where they haven't sold albums. It becomes a vicious cycle of decline, until the band is back working at their local Wal-Mart.
And you'll probably say 'I'm only one person, what does that matter?' Well, considering that millions of people hold that same view, it begins to matter A LOT. When musicians start losing their jobs because people aren't supporting them, I take that personally.
And you'll probably say 'I'm only one person, what does that matter?' Well, considering that millions of people hold that same view, it begins to matter A LOT. When musicians start losing their jobs because people aren't supporting them, I take that personally.
To be fair, the whole music distribution system has a lot of problems these days. The old way of paying $25ish for a CD for 1 song you like and a few others that are kind of okay was obvious crap. CDs covered in anti-piracy crap - some even forced you to use a full-screen player on the CD itself to listen to the music - f that. When the internet came along and got popular with non-geeks those days were numbered. And even now that you can buy music online for a buck or less, the songs you get are locked down aggravating files that try to control how you use them. My mother downloaded a whole bunch of music for her ipod and I tried to copy some onto my flash drive to put onto my laptop, but I couldn't get into the files even with the codes we got when we downloaded them despite the fact that they advertised that we could distribute them five times.
I have "illegal" mp3s of almost every song I have. If it's a really good cause and I love the music and the artist I buy them through legal channels mostly just to support the artists even though I never actually attempt to use the files I've downloaded since the DRM-free mp3s are so much more convenient and compatible. And honestly I find myself paying for less and less these days. Music files are so small and the DRM is so annoying that I can't even bother to make myself feel more ethical about the whole thing if it's gunna take a few hours to download stuff and require me to enter credit card information online numerous times.
I'm not saying that piracy is at all acceptable, hypocrisy or not. I just don't like fingering out the consumers as the cancer that is killing music when the distributors started this whole mess by turning music from an art a solitary musician or a band could jump in into an industry designed to take talent, strip it down to its core, and package it for mass appeal at max profits. Just sayin, it's gunna get worse before it gets better.
: AGH! MY HEAD!
: Walk it out you pussy, I've got like 32 more holes than you do.
