mirgro on 12 May 2010
| Lord N said: No one is saying that companies don't lose any money whatsoever, just not anywhere near what the industry claims, as every independent study so far has confirmed. Record sales were out of control in 2000 when every artist was going platinum, and at the same time, Napster was at its peak. I'll ask again, if it hurts these companies so badly, then what are the major record labels still doing in business? It takes an hour or two at the most to download an artist's entire discography. The idea that the industry loses billions of dollars every year is flawed in and of itself because it's based on a false assumption, which is that people use P2P or otherwise obtain bootleg copies of digital media for the sole reason they want to get everything for free. One of the things that made Napster and subsequent P2P networks so popular for people who wanted music is that the business model and quality of the recording industry's product started to suck and blow at the same time. People got sick and tired of being force fed band du jour, they sick and tired of the same cookie cutter artists rolling off of the assembly line, and most importantly, they'd had enough of paying $20 for a CD with two or three good songs and 10 or 11 filler tracks. Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus, Bearshare, Grokster, and the like allowed people to download the individual songs that they liked instead of having to plop down 20 bucks for a whole CD, which is something that the recording industry wouldn't give to them. People didn't start using P2P to download music because they didn't want to pay, they turned to that particular method because the industry wouldn't give them the product and service that they wanted, and if you don't do that, no matter what industry it is, you're going to lose business. Finally *surprise surprise*, companies started to notice this, at which point pay-for-download music services like iTunes and the like came about, and were immensely successful. But how could that be????!! After all, people just wanted to get things for free without paying? Wrong. They wanted a decent product, and having finally gotten one, they were once again willing to pay. Look at video games. Did shit like Securerom and Starforce do them any good? No, it actually made more people turn to P2P because they didn't have to deal with that kind of nonsense with an unauthorized copy. These companies know just as well as anyone that "piracy" doesn't cost them the amount of money that they claim. The real reason that they don't like it is because of the medium. People have been making bootleg CD's, movies, video games, and computer software for the longest time, but they didn't start making such a big deal about it until P2P networks became prominent, not because a person could make a digital copy of it and distribute it to all of humanity in a very short period of time, but because the internet is the only medium that they can't control. The industry can control what gets advertised on tv, radio, and in magazines. Why do you think that every time you turn on the radio you hear the same five songs fifteen times a day for three months? With the internet, on the other hand, everyone has equal representation, and that's why they don't like it. |
Good points here, especially in history. People have been trying to point at piracy as the death of an art form for years and years now. The radio was supposed to kill off music, remember? The casette was supposed to kill off Music as well. The printin press was considered to kill off literature as well, way back in the day. VHS and DVD were supposed to be killing off Movies.
Eve after all of those, everything is stil around and the world still turns. The fact is that businesses are lazy bastards which don't want to do anything but gain money. Anything new they want to stifle otherwise they have to get off their fat lazy asses and actually do some work for their money, boo hoo. This is where the internet is at currently.
