Up until about a month and a half ago (when I learned about the lawsuits), I was using the Kazaa file-sharing service. I had a ball downloading music and checking it out. It was far better than listing to the pap on the radio. And if I downloaded stuff I really liked, I would buy the CD.
In fact, on the way to work this morning, I was listening to Bob Dylan's 1997 album "Time Out Of Mind." I discovered this music on Kazaa and liked it so much that I not only bought that album but two other recent Dylan albums. I had no idea that Bob Dylan was still putting out such good songs. Certainly the radio never played them.
Which leads me to the next question. How is the consumer going to learn about all the music that is out there if they aren't allowed to be exposed to it? I'm talking about the consumers who aren't into Britney Spears, Eminem and other flavors of the moment. What about consumers who are real music fans and are hungry for some good music only they are never exposed to it?
I can think of other albums I have bought this past year due to discovering and downloading the songs off Kazaa. Two albums by Rhonda Vincent - an excellent bluegrass singer by the way, a Boston album I never even heard about, some old Rush albums, Neil Young, Supertramp, the list goes on. (Yes, I rediscover a lot of older music as well.)
The recording industry keeps yapping about a decline in record sales. The decline is not as steep as they would have us believe. They still sell tens of millions of CDs every week. Imagine how many more they would sell if they stopped gouging us at $15.98 and started charging a reasonable price. Pre-recorded VCR tapes used to cost $90 a film. Now you can get VCR/DVDs of most movies for about $20. Why hasn't the price of a CD gone down? The recording industry is still charging us pretty much what they charged when they first came out in the 1980s. And we all know that it isn't that expensive to manufacture a CD. Hell, you can buy a stack of 100 blank CDs at Wal-Mart for about $20 - or 20 cents per CD. So where they hell do they come off charging us $15.98?
There are still many CDs I'd like to own but I can't justify the price. For example, I'd love to own the Beatles catalog on CD. But they are still charging full price for them. We are talking albums that are now coming up on being 40 years old! I already bought them on vinyl and some of them on tape. Now they want me to pay $16 per CD all over again? Thanks but no thanks. So I am digitalizing my vinyl and tape collections. Sound isn't as good but I'm saving hundreds of dollars. Probably thousands. Still, if the Beatles catalog was selling for $5-7 dollars a CD, I'd snap it up. Maybe not all at once but certainly over a short period of time. Along with a lot of other stuff too.
This is the nasty secret that RIAA doesn't want you to know--the other big reason they want to stop P2P song swaps is because the industry loses the advertising dollars. If you listen to country for about 10 years you'll have a light bulb go off when I explain what the music industry is doing. First, there are only a couple big companies that own radia stations and they want to make money (nothing wrong with that). They found that they can make the most money by selling ads to women ~21 to ~35 because companies like Proctor and Gamble want to sell to women who make the buying decisions for the household. If they get them hooked on Tide at an early age they'll be with Tide for life. Proof of this is just compare country radio today with country radia of 10, 15, 20 years ago. Heck, just look at Travis Tritt. He used to sing about bars and drinking now it's 100% sap meant to bring in women. Or look at the new rising star--Pat Green. I loved his music in Texas (his 1st 2 CDs), but now that he's gone Nashville (which in a song he swore he'd never do) his music has weant from drinking, Texas, and running from the law to sap meant to bring in the women audience...and now he's nationwide since producing the sap. I read an article on the freerepublic a couple years ago that weant into detail about this and it was a real eye opener for me...now I know why I don't like country Radio that much. So to put it together, for everyone. It's the entire industry that hates P2P and the Internet. It's tougher for them to sell the trash they've been pushing on us for years. Plus their price fixing scheme has been revealed and still they hold on trying to protect their illegal business model. Yes that's right illegal. Price fixing is illegal and all the major labels are a part of it. Now this doesn't make it right to steal their music, but it does make it tough for them to get any sympathy when people do steal it.