Music on the cheap…
Everyone likes music, some people love music. I put myself in the love music category. I generally follow alternative/rock music, I do like some other genera’s of music but not as much as the alternative/rock genera. I like my music on the cheap, by on the cheap I mean cheap..$.99 to $1.09 for entire albums.
There has been a debate for a while about music on the cheap and or free downloads from the internet. Some bands/artists are/were in full support of this while others protest it every chance they get. The big names that come to mind in support of this are Limp Bizkit and The Offspring while the biggest name that comes to mind against it is Metallica. Limp Bizkit and The Offspring saw it as a way to get their music out there to the masses and realized they have more then enough money that people can download their music for free. They make it for the people so why not let them download it.
Metallica on the other hand saw it as steeling. They (and every other artist) are losing money every time someone downloads music for free or pays very little for the music. The artists are paying for the studio time to make their album, and some of them even pay for the distribution while the record label just sits back and collects their money. Your $12.99 CD back in the day, the artist saw maybe $2.00 from each CD sold. Metallica was one of the feature bands in helping to take down the original big name file sharing service Napster. After Napster went down the next big site was audio galaxy. After they went down, it was a free for all with applications such as Kazaa, Lime Wire, E-Donkey and others. Kazaa and Lime wire edventually caved into the pressure of the record labels and offered a pay service while still offering their free service. I don’t know about Kazaa but I do know with lime wire all you have to do is click on a box that says you won’t download illegally and the same content is available to you as if you were a paying customer.
Now a days the big thing is iTunes which offers albums for $9.99 or so on average and the music is protected. Unless you have someones account info for iTunes you can not transfer the music freely. There are some other web sites out there where you can download entire albums for $.99. I don’t know about you but I would rather download 10 albums for the price of 1. The music from the $.99 album site isn’t protected so you can share it with your homies without having to give out account information.
I think it’s a good and bad thing to have the cheap music. It gets the music out there for people to hear, however it does take money from the artist and puts it in the pocket of the individuals who are charging you to download the music from their site. The cheap music downloading is usually legal because the individual(s) base and register their servers with all of the music on it in a place that has very little and or does not have copyright infringement laws as far as music goes.
There’s A LOT more to write about this, I just don’t have the time for it right now. Anyone have any opinions on it?
I think it should be up to the artists whether or not they want to make their music cheap and/or free.
But then again- if we are to look at songs as art similar to poetry- you can access almost any poem on the web for free. But if you want the book…you have to pay. Same things for most kinds of literature: e-books are amazing.
But I guess the difference there is that if you like what you read, you’re very likely to go out and get the book: an e-book is good for a sampling, but very annoying to read online and/or print out in a huge sheaf of paper. With the music- once you download it, it goes on your ipod and the need to buy anything from the artist is kind of eliminated.
I am a little biased, though, because my sister has music on iTunes (and music videos) and I would hope that people would want to support her and buy it insteead of bootlegging it without any credit to the artist at all.
Does this same argument apply to bootleg movies? I don’t know- I somehow feel differently about that one. I think probably because the effect is diluted through the oodles of people involved (who are already making money off the theater sales, publicity, merchandise, etc anyway) instead of just one artist and his/her craft?