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cutnpasted from a similar argument on DI:
The argument that downloading music hurts sales is a misnomer because record companies equate every download to mean a guaranteed sale. Just because people download music does not mean that they are willing to pay for that music if the means to download it did not exist. In many cases--most, I'd say--songs are downloaded on a whim, simply for the ease of which it is to obtain them, listened to maybe once or twice, then discarded. If people could not do that, then they would likely just have to suffer not being able to listen to the song at all. Removing the avenues of downloading does not immediately translate to them grabbing their coat and heading out to the store to get the cd.
At any rate: Downloading is not killing music. It is killing the music INDUSTRY, the bloated, slow moving sloth that it is, and that can only be construed as a good thing.
It is time for us to recognize the fact that the age of spending a quiet afternoon writing a song and banking on its success for the rest of your life is over. Album-oriented marketing is coming to an end, and music as a tangible product is quietly being snuffed out. For now on, if you are a musician, the way to make your money in music is to do what you do best: play it. That's something that people can not download; the live performance.
The art of making money by recording and selling your work is at its sunset now. 100 years ago, before the invention of recorded media, musicians made a living by performing their music. In the future, they will return to this pastime.
(and, consequently, in all music contracts the artists are usually the last ones to get paid, and they get screwed 3 ways from Sunday, having to take out of their royalties to finance promotional campaigns and music videos. Many platinum selling artists in the past--Toni Braxton, TLC, MC Hammer come to mind--actually became poorer after their label was through with them, their entire careers crushed by insurmountable debt that they owed their own record companies. There's a lot of money to be made in the corporate music industry; unfortunately, the artists rarely see much of it. Touring is the only way many of them actually make money)
Part of the problem with this is the fact that the industry has too many hands in the cookie jar as it is. It is now a dead and dying carcass clinging onto tangible media, when digital media is the future. So it's not the artists that people are fed up about, really. It's the INDUSTRY that cultivates these artists. Or, rather, chews them up and spits them out. I'd pay $12 for a CD if I knew for certain that at least $11 of it was going to the three forces that created it: the producer, the performer, and the songwriter (one person or group is sometimes all three, but not always). But as it is, that money does not go to the deserved parties. Instead it goes to label designers, marketers, business execs, plastic manufacturers, photographers, advertisers, distributors, agents, lawyers, managers, whole-salers and retailers, and all the micro-industries that depend on the mass production of music from conception to completion of a tangible disc in your hands.
Musicians are the only ones who do not fear file-sharing, because they can always play music to make a living. That is a tangible talent that people respect and will pay money for. Record execs, label owners, marketers and advertisers, designers, and all the people who depend on the "CD market" trade are the ones who despise file-sharing the most, because it is cutting into their business, the business of music commodification and sales. You remove that, and they really don't have any means to make a living in the industry anymore.
It is for this reason that the only people who complain about music piracy are the well-established artists, pressured by their labels and their labels' lawyers to do so. Underground and independent artists never think that way, and 90% of the time are absolutely livid about the spread of their music on the internet. They see the online revolution as a levelling of the playing field. For 50 years the music industry controlled the media bottleneck to what you were allowed to hear, and furthermore, what you were allowed to like. By controlling radio and tv, they were in full control of whatever their customers were exposed to. Not anymore with the internet. It is breaking down barriers and fragmenting demographic markets so rapidly it's no wonder music execs are having a heart attack over this. They're losing control. They're losing power.
And that's really what it's all about.
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