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Perndog Perndog is offline
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 04:13 AM        Music piracy - opinions
Given the famous file-sharing crackdown going on, I thought I'd share my opinion on the whole situation and see where everyone else stands. Do you think the RIAA is justified in going after people online? Do you have anything against downloading music or copying CDs, or do you go ahead and do it?

Personally, I blame the music industry's problems on people simply copying CDs rather than downloading them. A kid gets a new album for his birthday, then within a week everyone in the neighborhood has got it - from my experience in high school, this is far more common than downloading an entire album and burning it. I refuse to copy my CDs for anyone, and all of the discs I own I have bought. However, I have a collection of nearly 3500 mp3s on my computer (about half are rips from my own CD collection, the rest I downloaded) and willingly share it online out of gratitude to all the file sharers I got the songs from. I justify downloading so much by the fact that I have paid for the better part of 200 albums and I feel I've done more than my part to support the industry; I allow everyone to leech my files because, as I said, I think file sharing is a minimal threat compared to CD copying.

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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 04:24 AM       
Half the songs you d/l are of real poor quality anyway. So most of the time you just d/l them to listen to see if they are ok before you buy the cd. I have d/l 1 full cd and half of it didnt even play. Luckily Aus isnt effected by it anyway.
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 04:54 AM       
That didn't make any sense. Do you mean half of the songs suck or half of the files are crappy? Most of what I download are songs I've heard already or from artists I'm familiar with, and there are still hundreds of those I haven't got yet. And I can only remember about a dozen times I couldn't find a hi-fi (~160kbps) rip of a song.
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 05:30 AM       
I usually just download mp3's unless I like the artist. It's stupid that people are getting shit for file sharing. Maybe if these bastards kept the cd's to $10 people wouldnt burn/download the CD's. File sharing is a great way to find other shit you like.

Generally people seem to prefer burning the cd's or just buying them rather than downloading a whole cd.

Then there are the pop/hip hop stars who dont deserve ANY of the money they make from dumbshits buying their music. Somebody should kill them all. But thats really neither here nor there.
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 05:37 AM       
If i download something and dont like it or intend to atleast buy the single i delete it. Everything i have downloaded i now have on cd except for things you cant get in AUS. I meant that half if not more of the mp3's shared are of poor quality(files from kazaa).
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 11:18 AM       
I have tons and tons of mp3s, I lost count but it's somewhere around 800 albums or more by now probably. But I also spend about $30 on CDs a week at least, so I don't feel to bad about it. The people that are ruining music are the ones that buy nothing and burn everything. Buying music in this day and age is like voting; buy the music from the bands you want to keep making music.
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 12:17 PM       
I'm not really into the whole mp3 thing, most of the files are bad quality and like most people, I just download to see if I even like the band. I don't see why thats a abd thing concidering most of the good music isn't on the radio or TV. but Mostly I download concert bootlegs and such, which are most .SHN and supported by the artist.

The penalty for downloading is fucking rediculous (up to $140,000 per song). I really can't see how you can cost a record company that much money by downlaoding one bad quality mp3.
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 12:20 PM       
The problem with that is that record sales really do little for the artist, unless they sell an absolutely massive amount. It's the record executives and companies themselves that are hurting from lack of sales.

While you might think, "who cares, those guys are assholes anyway," this directly translates into what you hear on the radio/tv these days. The record companies have to make money, which is why you see so much manufactured tripe mass marketed and then dropped by the second or third album, when they've found the next big thing.

And downloading mp3's has become a much bigger problem for the industry than merely copying CD's. If copying were a problem it would have been one long ago when people could dub records or cassettes. There was no lawsuit or list of names of all the people who bought a ten-pack of blank magnavox cassettes. The fact that action is being taken now, i think, show it is a larger problem.
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 02:21 PM       
I have a lot of MP3s. I use them like a free sample of some sort. If I like the album I downloaded enough, I'll go out and buy it.
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 02:27 PM       
I have around 50 gigs of mp3s, so i am probaly going to hell. but i still buy albums and go to shows :/ that should count for something
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 02:53 PM       
I agree. I just use mp3s to supplement the music I want to listen to but don't feel the need to rush out and buy. Most stuff I will buy if the price is right.
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Old Aug 28th, 2003, 06:38 PM       
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bennett
The problem with that is that record sales really do little for the artist, unless they sell an absolutely massive amount. It's the record executives and companies themselves that are hurting from lack of sales.
A pessimistic estimate puts between $0.60 and 2.00 in the pocket of an artist after all expenses for each copy sold (we'll say a buck average). Sell a thousand records, get a thousand dollars (along with the exposure that comes from people owning your album) - this is for the short time spent in the studio - days for unknown groups, weeks or months for bigger ones (and bands that can afford to spend more studio time are generally the ones who will sell mor records anyway). Record sales are good. Loss of record sales is painful, until there's a cushion of hundreds of thousands sold. But that's neither here nor elsewhere. This is the important point:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bennett
While you might think, "who cares, those guys are assholes anyway," this directly translates into what you hear on the radio/tv these days. The record companies have to make money, which is why you see so much manufactured tripe mass marketed and then dropped by the second or third album, when they've found the next big thing.
Well, yeah, the record companies have to make money. That's what they do. It doesn't matter whether they're losing ground or business is booming - they will do whatever makes them the most money. The process you just described is in no way a reaction to poor sales, it's how things are done, because it's profitable. They certainly aren't going to stop trying to make money when they're secure in their fortunes.

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Originally Posted by Bennett
And downloading mp3's has become a much bigger problem for the industry than merely copying CD's. If copying were a problem it would have been one long ago when people could dub records or cassettes. There was no lawsuit or list of names of all the people who bought a ten-pack of blank magnavox cassettes. The fact that action is being taken now, i think, show it is a larger problem.
There were lawsuits regarding copying tapes - there was even legislation. I don't know if you were around in the 80s when everyone was copying tapes, but it was a big deal to the people in charge. They thought copying tapes was going to ruin the music industry, and the only thing that prevented things from getting really bad was the advent of CDs, which couldn't be easily copied by every Joe on the street. Now they can, and since it's very difficult to crack down on that, they target file sharers instead, even if they're only a small part of the problem.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 12:00 AM       
Perhaps my first points were irrelevant, and I definitely have no way to prove it. It does seem to me, however that there is some correlation between the advent of file-sharing technology and the way that the industry has been managed in recent years. I am sure that there are other factors.

I still disagree with what you see as the bigger problem. Sure it is easier for companies to take action against sharers, but look at the amount of mp3's that people in this thread have admitted to having. The extent of file-sharing is huge. Imagine the effort it would take for one of those people to amass that amount of songs onto dubbed tapes. First you would have to know someone who has the desired song/album, and with most people saying they only take stuff they wouldn't buy, it doesn't seem likely that it would be very easy.

Yes, I was around in the 80s, and I don't remember there being anything of this scale. With the ease, extent and availability of file-sharing, there is just no way that I can see copying cds as a larger problem to the music industry.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 12:40 AM       
It's true that the volume of files shared is huge, but I have seen some pretty impressive collections of copied CDs - I'm not sure about young adults, but in high school, almost every person whose collection I saw had many more burned copies than originals, and several people owned several hundred copied CDs and only a couple dozen they had paid for. This includes all of the amateur DJs that worked at dances in the area, and I would have turned them in if they weren't my friends - I already disagree with copying CDs, and these guys were profiting from stolen music.

The other difference we haven't covered is that unless you own an mp3 or mp3 CD player (though they are getting more prevalent), you'll only be listening to your collection at your computer, so most of us want to carry CDs around anyway, and the place people listen to music most often (or so it seems to me) is in their cars, and since not many of us have mp3 players in our cars, CDs are still the way to go. And, again from talking to the people in high school with the huge burned collections (feel free to correct me if adults are different - my friends right now all pretty much agree with me on this issue so I don't know the other side of the story), far more burned CDs are direct copies rather than collections of downloaded files.

Finally, a lot of us buy albums after we download songs from them. When you copy a record, though, you won't have any incentive to buy it unless you really want the original packaging, in which case you would have bought it whether or not you copied it.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 01:56 AM       
This thread made me want to go out and buy a CD or two.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 11:14 AM       
We must just have a completely different group of peers. Even those people I know who have a ton of burnt cds, only have a respective handful that are direct copies. Most are either still in the mp3 format (a lot of radios, dvd players, cd players etc now will recognize them... my friend's new truck recognizes mp3s and it's got a five disc changer filled with burnt cds of mp3s) or they have been transferred to the wav format-normal cd.

I've seen just the opposite of what you're describing. I've seen people download an entire album, download the cover art and the art on the cd, stamp the cd with a label that looks like the art, put the cover art in an empty jewel case, and voila!

It may just be like I said, we have a different group of peers. Looking at this thread, however, nobody has really mentioned how many "direct copies" they have as compared to shared files. They have mentioned that they only download stuff when they wouldn't want to buy the whole album. From this statement, it seems like if they wanted a whole album they would buy it rather than copy it.

The last time I did it, which was a while ago, ripping and burning songs from a group of cds was a MAJOR pain in the ass. Could you imagine swimming through the pile of cds it would take to amass 50 gigs of mp3s? Especially if you're only taking a few songs from an album you otherwise wouldn't buy.

That last statement is key in this discussion, I think. You now have the ability to say, "oh I don't want to buy that album, there's only one good song on it, and I can get that from Kazaa." Before, a person might be swayed to buy an album if they had heard one or two songs they liked. Whereas now, they know they can get it for free. Why bother if you don't want the whole album. Similarly, sales for singles is a shadow of what it used to be, you only have to go to the nearest record shop to see how tiny the singles sections have become. Who wants to pay five or six dollars for a cd single or 15 dollars for a cd with a couple good songs on it?
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 11:24 AM       
I have about 300 or so (guessing because I've never counted) "real" copies of CDs, and about 15 burnt CDs. I hate having a burnt CD instead of the real thing, it's just so shitty. But I do admit to having 800 or so albums on my computer and CDs. But I do buy tons of shit, hell, I bought 7 albums in the past 2 days.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 11:25 AM       
Quote:
Half the songs you d/l are of real poor quality anyway.
I slightly agree with this, as most people when they rip the songs to mp3 use shitty encoding, or the volume levels are all scewy...

Personally I am all about piracy- RIAA is basically reaping what they have sown... OF course noone can see the future, but , if RIAA took actions at the inception of the boom of Internet communications they would not be in the boat they are now.. And the fact that they are trying to crack down on this is laughable.. Its kinda like dealing with revolutionaries- You may kill a few people off here and there.. But you wont stop the revolution...

Personally I really like what apple is doing where you can purchase specific songs off an album as opposed to the whole thing, lets face it... In a 30 second period i could probably name off 15-20 albums i bought that i only liked one or 2 songs on the entire album... ITs kinda sad...
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 12:46 PM       
"In a 30 second period i could probably name off 15-20 albums i bought that i only liked one or 2 songs on the entire album... ITs kinda sad..."

That just means you listen to really shitty music. Every album I buy I like at least 90% of the songs, if not all of them. Get albums by good bands and all the songs will have merit.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 01:15 PM       
Quote:
Originally Posted by Royal Tenenbaum
The people that are ruining music are the ones that buy nothing and burn everything. Buying music in this day and age is like voting; buy the music from the bands you want to keep making music.
I have a really shitty computer, so I can't download much, but I disagree with your argument.

I think markets change, and innovations spawn change. The RIAA is reacting in a very reactionary manner, and it will only hurt them in the end. They can't stop this downloading craze, but in the meantime, while they spend their time suing college students and heading a witch hunt, they could be adapting to the changes. They COULD lower the prices of their products, they COULD sell songs for dirt cheap online. Sell a song for $ .05, and give away some special feature with it that you can't get by merely d/l a song from Kazaa.

They need to be proactive at a time when they are in fact trying to fight the tide, and it'll only ruin them. I don't subscribe to the notion that people who don't buy CDs are ruining music. People who only buy CDs and never go to see the acts live at real venues are ruining live venues, so should those live venues be up in arms....?
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 05:09 PM       
No way they're selling songs for .05 apiece. I can see a buck, or maybe seventy cents, but not .05 - only about $4.00 per CD goes to packaging and materials, so that means the record company, the artist, and all other interests are splitting up between $8 and $14 for the album when it's bought in a store. They're might have to reduce their profits per copy, but it won't be by such a drastic amount.

Quote:
Originally Posted by The Royal Tenenbaum
"In a 30 second period i could probably name off 15-20 albums i bought that i only liked one or 2 songs on the entire album... ITs kinda sad..."

That just means you listen to really shitty music. Every album I buy I like at least 90% of the songs, if not all of them. Get albums by good bands and all the songs will have merit.
I agree with Tenenbaum here. Most bands who write their own music and/or haven't been manufactured by the business tend to release real albums instead of hit singles, meaning most of the album should be of similar quality. It's mainly the pop stars who have a couple of singles and a bunch of crap to back them up.

Either that or you're just really, really, picky.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 09:02 PM       
Quote:
Originally Posted by Perndog
No way they're selling songs for .05 apiece. I can see a buck, or maybe seventy cents, but not .05 - only about $4.00 per CD goes to packaging and materials, so that means the record company, the artist, and all other interests are splitting up between $8 and $14 for the album when it's bought in a store. They're might have to reduce their profits per copy, but it won't be by such a drastic amount.
Um, I think online providers are already selling them for really cheap. :/

That's a good start, but what they need to do is give them a little fluff, make buying a song for $ .05 more appealing and convenient than d/l one for free....
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 09:25 PM       
The current online standard is 99 cents per song, at least on the major sites (i.e. the ones that get decent amounts of traffic) like Apple, BuyMusic, and Liquid Audio. Sites that sell memberships with unlimited downloads often have small collections, and sites that sell individual tunes for cheaper often have renewal fees to keep files for over a month and charge 99 cents for files that won't expire.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 10:36 PM       
I don't have any sort of problem with downloading albums, i'm the same way as Snake is. When i've got the cash, i'll buy an album, but there's just too much that i like for me to be able to keep up monetarily. It's also incredibly convenient to be able to store a massive playlist on your pc, so that switching cds and fetching them from a cd wallet is no longer necessary.
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Old Aug 29th, 2003, 10:42 PM       
yea exactly. I have my whole collection at my fingertips instead of having to have a 300 disc changer.

not only that but most records stores around me have a shitty selection. I would rather mostly support a band by going to see them and getting the record straight from them than barely support them by buying their album from a record store.

And I think the direct copy cd thing is a MUCH smaller problem than downloads.
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