mike powell wrote:
bLuE oRdEr wrote:
I have yet to hear any coherent explanation as to why it's OK to steal from artists.
is it a crime to steal from thieves??
most artists ,well in fact99% of em have been stealing a living as it is.
and now that joe public has a chance to "sample" their wares before forking hard earned cash for whatever it may be , DVD?CD ect and deciding whether to purchase an item or not,is hardly stealing.
factomundo ,more cds,and dvds have been sold in the last 12 months in the uk than in any other 12 month period before??
online downloading is killing music,film ect my ass.
i can remember back in the 70s when 7"single had stickers on the sleeves stating (home taping is killing music) thats the exact phrase.
the greedy media industry wants to drop its prices in the uk and then they may have a case for whining.
interesting point,why does a cd in the u.s.a cost less than half the cost in the u.k.?
I don't believe for a nanosecond that most people who download are "sampling the wares" before making a purcahse decision. I just read a news article about the growing incidence of muggings on NYC subways. The objects of the thieves' attention are ipods. One whiner complained that he lost 12,000 songs when his ipod was jacked. 12,000. Does anybody seriously believe this guy purchased 12,000 songs at what, $1 a pop? Does anybody seriously believe that the whiner was only "sampling the wares" before deciding what to purchase? Poor little whiner. He committed 12,000 individual acts of theft, and now some thief stole it all from him. Boo fucking hoo.
If people think the artists are "thieves," why patronise them at all? Why not boycott them? The simple fact is, the artists have created something people want, and given a choice between paying the artists, or jacking it out the backdoor, a lot of the artists' "fans" apparently feel perfectly fine about jacking it out the back door, all the while complaining about what thieves the artists are.
I don't like the price of CD's either, but the artists only get a miniscule percentage of the total price. There's a lot more in the price of a CD than the artist's share. For example, labels have to pay for overhead, promotion, signing fees, pressing, recording time... Not every artist on a label returns a profit to the label, either. The successful artists pump enough money back into the label to enable the label to take chances on other artists that aren't guaranteed sellers. Take any label, think about the artists on that label, and then ask, which of those artists are guaranteed to return a profit, and which of those artists the label is taking a chance on, because they have million-selling artists pumping enough money into the label to support the risk. Does any music lover really believe that music would be better if only the artists guaranteed to sell could get signed? Would the world be a better place if Warners dropped New Order and kept the likes of Madonna and Eric Clapton?
I don't like buying a CD and discovering that there's only one good song on the entire CD, either. That's when I feel ripped off. Here's a simple solution to separate the "samplers" from the thieves: Free downloads of 45 second samples of every song on every CD. That's enough sampling time for someone to decide if they like the CD enough to fork over their hard-earned cash. Then, anybody who downloads the entire CD isn't "sampling" before making a "purchasing decision," they're stealing.
