Whats the Differance? Right or wrong?

[Extreme John]

Ok, Im just curious what your views are on Piracy, everything from Downloading Music, Software, Movies, etc.

On a personal level I refuse to copy music for anyone, with the low prices the shit is cheap enough to go and buy, not to mention in my opinion it will keep good music coming from the people you support when buying their products.

Same goes for DVD's, Software... To me at least. The shit is cheap enough, so do you Buy it or Steal it? Do you consider it stealing, or something that is owed to you?

Whats your deal?

[dareutwo]

Both??
Actually I buy all software and dvds, music is the touchy one.
I believe that the days of the actual music companies are numbered.
If Band "X" cannot produce it's own C/D's and market them, then that is there problem.
Bulk blank C/D's cost .08 or less.

Consumers for the most part aren't stupid. When they see a $20.00 USD C/D price tag, they will run home and download it for free.

You should be seeing a ton more 9.99 C/D's in the next few months. (especially the top 40 hits)
But this still won't fix the problem in the music industry.

The mechanism that created the need for the record industy no longer exists.

[MrMaryLou]

Dowloading Music na why its free on the radio

[backoffbitch]

The truth is, buying cd's only benefit the labels and distributors. The actual musicians get a ridiculously low cut off the cd's. To put it in perspective,... the Metalica black album only netted 10 cents per cd to the actual band. Where bands do make money is tours and other merchandice like t-shirts and posters. Unfortunately if you are an independant musician you are still populating the lables and distributors with more cash. There is a levy on recordable media comming into place in Canada in 2004 (US resideents are already levied but at an unoticable amount). The rate is somehting like 40 dollars per gigabyte of storage on any media device containing a hard drive. Cd's will go up 10 cents, flash media and smart media will almost double. All of this will be collected by the government and divided out amongst record labels and distributors. So really, lables and distributors will still make bank of of MY songs that I wrote and that I recorded for MYSELF on audio cd's.

So no, I don't buy cd's anymore. The only cd I would ever buy is a Dream Theater cd because they have major control over marketing and distribution and take a larger than nomal cut of the profits.

[matt]

Originally posted by backoffbitch
The truth is, buying cd's only benefit the labels and distributors. The actual musicians get a ridiculously low cut off the cd's. To put it in perspective,... the Metalica black album only netted 10 cents per cd to the actual band. Where bands do make money is tours and other merchandice like t-shirts and posters.

True to some degree, but if the record companies don't make the money they want from the album sales then the band has to pay for it.

There are great bands out there that will spend the next 10 years (literally) touring to pay back record companies because their albums didn't sell enough.

The recording industry is in for some big changes, which I believe may actually benefit the bands. I think recording and distibution companies will slowly disappear and promoters will become the big players, with bands higher up in hierachy than they are now.


Matt

[Cleo]

I was doing a lot of music downloading at one point mostly because I often couldn’t find what I was looking for at the store.

This all changed with Barnes and Noble opening a store a few blocks from me where you can listen to a sample of any track just be putting the CD under the scanner. Also Amazon has hard to find CD and you can also listen to many of the tracks. Apple also opened the iTunes store where you can listen to and then buy any track for 99¢. With these three places to buy music from I never steal my music anymore.

I've always bought my software since my other job is a computer consultant and I need the manuals since I'm basically paid to read the manual, lol.

I'm a pretty honest person, I even pay for the empty wrapper at the grocery story from whatever I've consumed while taking care of the munchies while shopping.

[urb]

Originally posted by Cleo
I even pay for the empty wrapper at the grocery store from whatever I've consumed while taking care of the munchies while shopping.

I do that too.

[Nickname]

Oh well, when I think about it the most legal thing on my computer is the porn, the music and software is downloaded and cracked.....excepty for 1 thing superjpg I have bought.....accually everything that I use with the bussines is legal, except for notepad that came with the windows I got from a friend.....

I know im scum.....but I cant see why people accually would buy a CD for $20 when its free online, I do have a lot of bought cd's but they just lay scrapping around. If the cd's was like $5-6 I would buy em and rip em to mp3 to have on the puter |rasta|

[Ms Naughty]

I think downloading online music is a good opportunity to obtain rare or obscure stuff that I'd never have a chance to hear. I used it to discover a great band called Ekova, I then went to the effort of buying the album from Amazon in the UK for a heap of money, couldn't get it anywhere else (or much of it online).

I also bought the new Sting CD on Monday, but the Australian version is missing a track that everyone else gets. I'll be downloading that missing song.

I've also downloaded songs which I'd never have bothered to pay money for, where I liked only one song but wouldn't buy a whole album. In that situation, yes, I should be like Cleo and pay the $1 (although I did this quite a few months ago, before that option was available)

I really don't listen to new music anymore, mostly because the stuff that comes out is absolute crap... and this is due to the record companies sticking with "safe bets" all the time. If mp3s can shake that up a bit, and give more freedom and money back to the bands, I think they're a good thing.

So perhaps my view is, if I could download music and pay only the bands/musicians for it, then I'd do that.

I suspect I'm justifying wrongdoing here... oh well. Then again, as MML says, it's free on the radio...

By the way, we went to the effort of buying the new Metallica album, and now we wish we'd just downloaded it.

[Cleo]

I have just under 20 gigs of MP3s on an old Mac laptop that is permanently hooked to my home stereo system. I use iTunes as a music jukebox replacing my CD player.

About 80% is from CDs that I own. Another 15% is from music that I have bought digitally from the iTunes store. This leaves about 5% that was downloaded or copied from someplace.

At 99¢ a track there just is no reason to go through the trouble of looking any other place. This service will be available to Windows users before the end of the year and to Europe sometime next year. The reason it is not in Europe yet is due to problems with licensing. The music producers just don't seem to get it. Instead they come out with expensive CDs that have copy protection on them and give all kinds of problems.

CDs are going the way of 8 tracks. Music to go is the future.

[lordaron]

for me its to long a walk to the record store..I just download the music and if I like it I buy the album, the only albums I buy 100% when they come out are Black Metal albums and such since they deserve much more credit and money than the commercial pop shite that makes a buttload anyways

[Ms Naughty]

I just had to add this...

Remember when you used to tape songs off the radio?

I used to listen for hours hoping they'd play the song I wanted, and slowly compile a tape of fave music. Then there were the sad attempts to record tape-to-tape by putting two cassette players together and shushing everyone that came into the room...

I should add that I was about 11 at the time... Kids these days have it so lucky LOL

[Greenguy]

I used to use Napster to grab some rare stuff (bootleg's mostly) But now all the programs seem to be loaded with so much shit ads that I don't even bother.

I did also make some mix CD's but that's mostly because I'm lazy - between the Bitch & me we probably have 500 CD's & who has the time to copy the songs you want to your hard drive & then burn them - LOL

[urb]

Last CD I bought was by a band called "Half Man Half Biscuit" and the album was "Back In The DHSS / ton Riots".

Anyone heard of them???

I doubt they got any exposure outside of the UK, as most of their lyrics are about UK celebs and TV stuff.

I purchase regularly from Amazon UK.

[Ramster]

I think burning a CD and doing the same to a DVD is different. Owning the DVD for your collection is nice and expected but burning CDs is basically common place now.

I don't think it's right though as it puts a hurt into the economy all around but it's much easier to put together a collection of a bands songs for one burnt CD rather than buying 3 or 4 to get the same songs.

[Linkster]

Originally posted by grandmascrotum
I just had to add this...

Remember when you used to tape songs off the radio?

I have to laugh when I think about a freind of mine and I discussing the 45's we owned when we were teens...a coworker that had just gotten her Masters degree walked up and asked us if our parents knew we owned guns at that age LOL

just stuck in my mind cause of trying to strech the microphone from the reel to reel tape deck to the big box we played the Beatles songs on when they came out..had a big attachment you had to put on the spindle if you wanted to play a whole stack of 45s in a row

[ImageChanges]

I briefly touched on this with John on the Obie TRice thread, but I'll repost it here also.

First off, Software.
I'm about 50/50 with software, most games, I make sure I go out and buy them, but if its a graphic utility i.e, photoshop, that is priced at $400.00 + I gotta tell you, I'm gonna do the quick downlaod and get it installed. This is in part by the fact that I really couldn't afford half of the software that I use for graphic design. If i could afford it, I might buy it, for example, I could easy shell out for a program that costs like 40-100 bucks, but anything that is too marked up, I'd have to go for the d/l. It's just that these days it's just too easy to get ANYTHING you want for nothing, I wouldn't want to take away from the people who created the programs, but I'm danmn sure, they all got paid.

This is some of my thoughts on music downloads, taken from the Obie TRice thread:
A little about the downloading of music,

I just finished downloading the new Obie Trice album, yes I just downloaded it. I’m not against downloading the music, I don’t go overboard and download hundreds of songs, and I don’t spread what I download. I got to tell you that I will never buy an album unless I know for sure that it is good, I mean I hate albums that have one good single and the rest of the album just bites. If that’s the case the song will end up in my winamp’s play list, and that’s it. If it’s an album that just rocks, I might go out and shell out the cash, but that hasn’t happened in quite a few months. I hate the musicians who are putting pressure on everyone to start prosecuting people for downloading music, I don’t feel like it hurts these people at all. I guarantee that every artist that I have ever downloaded has a nicer house and bigger bank account than I do. What about the poor kids who can’t afford to buy albums, wouldn’t you rather these kids spreading your music instead of not getting a chance to listen to it, and become fans. These are the kids MORE likely to go to the shows, but a t-shirt, and help fatten the artist’s wallets. When I was growing up, I damn sure didn’t have the money to be able to listen and be exposed to all the music that I wanted to, if I wanted a certain album I had to shell out the 15-20 bucks to buy the cd, or cassette. Now kids have the opportunity to be able to listen to all the music that they want to, music that may inspire these kids to be musicians themselves. So the record industry sales has slipped 30% over the last year, so some fat cat in some high rise office, didn’t make that extra few million this year. I will be shedding tons of years for them tonight. If I was an artist I’d make all my music available for free, and I guarantee you’d have a bigger, more devoted audience. Isn’t art supposed to be about the art and not about the money? Just seems to me that these people care more about the all mighty dollar than they do about the fans who support them.

But I must say that the new Obie Trice album rocks the diso-tech, the tracks are slammin’ and the beats are hot, definitely check it out if you have a chance. Dr. Dre has worked magic on these beats, he makes it sound like the old west coast sound that dre has perfected over the years. Fucking classic album.


miKe