If you pirate music, you're downloading communism!

[Alex S. Garcia]

> I wonder where you get that 90% figure.

Quite simply from personal experience. And I'm not talking about
interviews or surveys where people could easily make things up but real
conversations that were not necessarily about downloading but where the
topic would pop up. It is a trend that I've noticed over and over again.
And I will give more credit to these raw and sincere conversations any day
over the statements of greedy labels.

Yet another proof of the RIAA's hypocrisy: when they first started blaming
downloaders for the decrease in CD sales they carefully avoided mentioning
DVD's. None of the charts that were released at the time would take DVD
sales into account. And yet those were steadily increasing. So. Wouldn't
it make sense for CD sales to go down, then? DVD's were still fairly new
at the time. If you're gonna start buying lots of those it makes sense
that you'd have less money to spend on CD's, no?

> In my experience most people
> who download music download songs that are already popular.

People download all sorts of things. I think you'd be surprised by some of
the very specialized places out there ;-) But yes, the most popular stuff
gets more downloaded, just like it gets sold more in the stores. But,
again, from experience I can tell you people are getting more and more
disenchanted with the popular stuff. In fact, I've noticed a shift in what
is considered popular. Of course, you could see it as just a new trend,
but still, I find it interesting. Of course your basic teenybop crap is
still popular and likely will always be :-o but rock seems to have made a
serious 'comeback'. We shall see what the future holds...

> Otherwise
> the RIAA wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

Honestly, I don't think they do! What they do have is a lot of excuses,
with tons of time and money to waste. Time and money that would be better
spent paying the artists better and trying to find a REAL solution to the
downloading issue. Someone suggested an annual fee. I love that idea. Of
course they would still find ways to screw over the artists, but I guess
that will never change :-(

> They do not use downloading
> as a way to "discover" new acts. They have internet radio to do that
> and much of it is quite good IMHO.

When it works :-) Internet radios can be a good alternative, that's true.
However the quality is not always very good. Besides, hearing one song on
a radio is not always enough. I've bought albums sometimes after hearing
one song I really loved... and then ended up disappointed by the rest. I'm
sure this has happened to most of us at least once. So it doesn't really,
totally resolve the issue.

> I think that most people who
> download obscure acts do it because said acts, while being quite
> excellent in musical and other ways, have gotten discouraged and
> broken up by the time the true music enthusiast has actually
> discovered them. An ironic shame really.

I'm curious about something... Do professional musicians get regular mails
from the RIAA or somesuch, anything keeping you "informed" about what they
are doing and how downloading is affecting sales, etc.

The reason I'm asking is that what you wrote above Al sounds to me so
pessimistic and borderline depressing. Do you really believe this? There
likely are some acts of this type, though if they are that obscure chances
are they weren't selling CD's to begin with, downloading or not. Heck
there were acts like that even before downloading started. So to blame the
downloaders for their gruesome deaths would be a bit exaggerated ;-)

If anything, downloading is helping many of those obscure bands of today
by getting their music out, better spread, and acquiring them fans who
would never otherwise have been able to know they even existed, let alone
buy their music.

> There's plenty of music that is available
> for free. Why should people need to steal it? Isn't this obvious?

I think the whole problem comes from the fact that the RIAA/labels/artists
(some anyway) consider downloading as stealing. Whereas downloaders don't.

Personally when/if I download something I don't think to myself 'oh what
am I going to steal today'. It will more likely be something like 'hmm,
I've heard that one song that sounds really cool, I wonder what the rest
of the album sounds like'. Note that if I had a friend who owned the album
I would borrow it from him. If not I'll download it. What's the
difference? If I like it enough I'm still gonna go buy it anyway.

If I borrow a CD, the artist doesn't get paid either. Is that stealing
too? Heck, even copying a borrowed CD is not seen as stealing.



Alex.