Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Musicians Say P2P File Sharing Doesn’t Hurt Them!



According to a recent article on CNN.com, many musicians don’t think that popular file-sharing programs, such as Kazaa, Morpheus, and Napster (RIP) have influenced the business negatively. They actually believe that the presence of music on the internet has helped them make more money!

Here are some stats from the study, conducted by the not-for-profit companies Pew Internet and American Life Project on 809 musicians:

47% of the artists surveyed said file sharing prevented them from earning royalties on their songs.
43% of the artists surveyed said file sharing helped promote and distribute their material.
66% said that file sharing was a very little threat to them.
30% said that file sharing was a major threat.

In the past few years, bands, record labels, and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) have sued thousands of their own fans and customers for downloading songs of their favorite artists (the whole thing started with Metallica pussy Lars Ulrich). This has prompted new, innovative ways for the artists to re-coup their losses and retain their paying customers, such as including bonus DVDs with their music CDs, and making pay-per-download sites available.



One of the most famous pay-per-download sites is iTunes by Apple. On July 11th of 2004, iTunes had its 100 millionth download, so there is definitely a big market for non-retail music purchasing

This leads me to raise the following question: with the online music business becoming so established, why would there be a need to go to some retail store and buy a CD when you could buy it without leaving your house? Just a few clicks and its downloaded, burned to a CD, and backed up on your hard drive. Want the actual artwork? You can use printable CD labels, or even better, printable CDs.

Or, of course, you could continue to download “illegally” like so many others currently are. I am not an advocate of illegally doing anything (no homo), but given the quality of the music (or lack thereof) currently being released; I wouldn’t blame anybody for downloading a song occasionally.

2 comments:

Fitz said...

good article. no homo?

Bill said...

I thought saying that not supporting illegal activities made me sound gay, so I added a "no homo".