I was just curious as to how downloading music affects the band/artist? Rock Stars make millions every hour and they bitch and complain not to download their stuff. I'm not a fanboy of music, I don't download music at all so I really don't understand this. I was doing some research and before Morpheus/Limewire was ever around, there was a program called Napster. Sometime between 1998 & 2002, Metallica sued Napster, after wining a couple of other unknown bands and artist did the same. They all won and Napster was forced to close. I don't know if this was a real interview since there was no video. It featured Nikki Sixx (Motley Crue) & James Hetfield (Metallica).

Nikki Sixx: Metallica was nothing but greedy. They sued because fans downloaded their stuff. How are Metallica fans saposse to hear their music, if Metallica doesn't release their CD's in their cities? Nothing but damn greedy. The odds of being shut down (Shut down?) as a band due to people downloading your music is extremly low.

James Hetfield: You won't understand it, until it's happening to you.

This interview was also featured on Much Music's 10 minute show based on downloading music, which I caught the last 2 minutes of.

Does anybody care to explain?

Napster is alive & Well and Making BIG BUCKS.
http://www.napster.com/choose/index.html

And Napster was making a lot of money before the lawsuits.

Artist’s were losing money from the free downloads at Napster.

A Band releases a hit CD and that same day, tens of thousands of people around the World could pick it up for free off of Napster. Tell me where the Band makes money from that> And the sales of their CD’s usually do provide the bulk of the Bands income.

A million people buy a $10 cd equals $10,000,000 in sales.
It will take a whole lot of touring for a Band to make that kind of gross… ~rore

I resent having to pay premium prices for the music of artists who are now deceased. Still collecting substantial royalties from the work of those who are no longer with us is real greed.

I read somewhere a good point: a movie usually costs tens of millions of dollars to make if not more and a DVD is sold typically for only about twice, or less, that of a music CD, which only costs a few hundred thousand dollars to make.

Andrew posts: I resent having to pay premium prices for the music of artists who are now deceased.

I hear ya Andrew! That’s why I love those sites where I can pick and choose my favorite music for about a buck a song…lol

Although most of them seem to be compressed so the full fidelity will not be present… But you get what ya pay for… ~rore

A buck a song still seems pretty expensive to me. If an album is ten songs, then you are paying ten dollars an album. I use the Amazon Market Place to buy music, where you can get new CDs really cheap. I pay a fraction of what I see the same CDs going for in music stores. When I do see them in the shops, that is--music stores do not have the same variety, as they usually cater only to common tastes.

Two people make money off of CDs, large record companies and small musicians on small record companies. The large record companies are downright appalling, they attack their own customers and break the law to do it (if they can't break a law, they buy a new one). These days music isn't so much art as a commodity.

That said I only listen to non RIAA represented music and I generally buy the cd (although a good portion of my music has been released for free). I buy the cds usually to support the record companies that release them, the artists make most of their money off of touring.

this is capitalism so they can go to hell.

Yeah! no one should be able to do well from their talent or effort!! Whatever anyone produces should be mine for free! everyone just share everything! yeah!

sigh.

If I create something and you want it, why shouldnt I get the benefit from that? And if you think it is too expensive, then dont buy it!

Capitalism certainly needs to be regulated. But it has proven, by far, one of the best principles around which to organize a society that has numbers of a few thousand members.

There is a bit of a trend these days I have seen for artists to market and distribute there own music via pay/song/cd websites. This cost out the CD companies completely and makes the CDs' more affordable. Plus the profits go to the artist directly. As far as the MP3 thing goes, there is a 3rd option. Many people just cant afford to buy CD's, i don't know where you guys get cd's for $10.00 because most new release cds over here are typically around $38
This means that many just don't buy them. It is like text books, i love them, but most computer texts start at around $60, and the really desirable ones are over $100. So I look stuff up on Google.
If CDs do become more affordable, people will start paying for them.

Here in Japan Cds are pretty expensive (foreign CDs about 2800 yen--25 dollars, Japanese Cds are about 3800 yen.. 34 dollars). I still buy. But here you can also rent CDs.

I spend a lot more money on music since I found ways of getting each album for less money. I buy (fairly obscure and dated) albums, but I don't sympathize with the whinging of the recording industry about downloaders. They could probably make more money if they were more modest about the price of each release.

I spend a bit on music even though it's expensive here like Dundee says... I have almost at least 1000 cds, all genuine the real thing.... There are a few second hand music shops here and amazing how many people resell their CD's after playing them only once or so... come from deseased estates etc... though admitedly you can't always get what you may be wanting and have to put in an order so if it comes in it's yours...

I always keep an eye on the charity shops like Vinnies (St Vincents) who sell second hand clothes etc coz I have bought some good ones there on occassion for $2... school fetes... weekend junk markets... Music shop sales are good... even big department stores can have CD sales... Then there are the local libraries you can borrow them from and rip em off that way... You just have to be willing to spend the time and be willing to wait...

But I do dowload some but not much... where some people have converted old records and tapes to the mp3 format... In my case, it's a specialty one, old ethnic traditional folk music type stuff I'm after which I have no hope of ever finding here nor can it be ordered and much of it was never put on CD... That's mostly for my dad I do it for... so he can sit in memory lane and dream and when we visit him he can play it for us and whine to us of what it was like when he was young and how great life was back in them days in the old country... sigh...

Dingo
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That great vet but i think i just keep downloading music and not paying the artist shit because personally i just don't give a fuck.

Except in the current market the ones making money are the recording companies or the 'artists' (read: Britany Spears) who have no talent. The artists should be getting the money but most small artists get cut out of most of the money from CD sales.

If you actually want to support artists, either find a way to pay them directly or go to live events.

Dubbing, as it was originally called when this became possible, has caused a deterioration in sales. With tapes, the quality was poor. Most didn't bother. But, when digital manipulation became real, you can knock off a CD with as little as 0.001% error rate. Don't even miss it.
When the peer-to-peer networking became un-interruptible, sales dropped 10-20% depending on genre. Money, is unfortunate in that it drives most of today's "talent", but that's the way it is. This is what the industry wants. Someone to inundate you with, and tell you you like them. So you get into their merchandising.

Mostly, though, musical venues these days make more money than they ever have. So, I'm not really sure either why they complain about a few; because I don't know of a band played often that doesn't have a fleet of personal jets. They even like writing songs about them at times: 'Awake on my Airplane' by Filter is an example.
It's all about greed, and it's not likely to change, any time soon.

I say download the song you want, and spend nothing.

Why? I'll tell you.

Artists sell albums, not songs. Every artist who has a hit song, or a song I like, usually has it for sale on an album. So then, why must I be forced to buy an entire set of songs that I don't want, to get the one song that I do want? So you ask, what about single tracks of the song? Not every artist/record label puts out single song tracks of every song they have recorded. And so, there is not a viable economic standard by which artists and record labels choose to enterain their customers. In otherwords, they are failing to meet customer demand by selling bundled products; songs I do not want, along with one song I do want, for an inflated price. Should the customer be forced to buy a bundled product simply because those who own the copyrights offer it no other way? I think not.

Why don't I just sign up for a website that has $1.00 single downloads? Answer: because I am paying for a copy of a copy. Now we get into the legalities of distributing copy-writed music. Copied music is available everywhere for a price, or for no price. The sites that charge you to own a copy, are in a contract with the artist to copyright their music and distribute it. Fine except there are those sites where the same copy is free. Of course it is not legal to obtain a copy that you have not purchased. And that is why I download what I want, listen to it, then delete it. And that is perfectly legal, much in the same fashion as listening to the song on the radio. All free, all legal.

So the artist and record companies are crying cause they are broke like the rest of us? Boo-hoo. Maybe they'll write a song about how much it sucks to go from being a greedy arse to being a regular person. In any case they can bite me, cause putting a price tag on artwork means it was inspired by greed, and I have always boycotted owning such things including "greed inspired artwork".

This post has been edited by DisproveU: Oct 3 2008, 08:48 PM

if you feel guilty about not paying for music than you should terrible about buying half the things most people purchase.

Its now a known fact that artists actually dont make a lot of money through sales of their music be it albums or singles the real big money is now made through merchandise it speaks for itself when you look at a band like KISS the amount of merchandise they've brought out over the years everything from childrens lunch boxes to burial coffins if you had bought all the items they have released not only would you have spent a small fortune you would have enough items to open a museum as many of you know my friend is lead singer in the U.K. folk metal band Skyclad their last album was on p2p site 2 days after its release but as he said what can we do hopefully someone will download the album and go out and start collecting our back catalogue of albums theres no way of stoping downloading if all the sites are shutdown they will just go underground i think its to big now to be honest i dont think theres anything wrong in downloading a few tunes the people who ruin it are the people who download album after album and sell them on they are the real problem i couldnt agree more with Mandelasdisciple comments

Oh. Click me to see how Bush has finally put the finishing touches on his 8 year legacy!

Good news...terrorism revenue will be shorted...more jobs...and more protection to intellectual property.

Bad news...Riskier to download music and stroll black markets...the wealthy have nothing to bitch about now that its all even steven.

peace,
Austin

Galvacon... What I find fascinating is how America thinks that all other countries will comply with their copyright laws... Try telling this to some of the Asian countries or Russia or some of the European countries.. Some countries are certainly more lax about this than others...

I've seen occassions where p2p sites, like some torrents, have disallowed American IPs to use their fascilities at times because of all the whoop la about this. By the same token, there is an American stream radio site posted here as being great site but when I tried to get in I got a message saying it's only for Americans. They didn't say why... So to get to it all I had to do was go there via an American proxy site and whalla... I got in...

I figured that if everyone who used the internet downloaded illegally (wittingly or unwittingly) be it music, movies or documented information and was sent to jail because they refused to pay up... then the whole world would be one big jail and all existing jails would have to be used for the free people who have never done anything 'illegal' on the internet.

Dingo
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