Article: The Age of Music Piracy Is Officially Over

**Cabalo** · 12-06-2010, 05:45 AM

You can view the page at https://filesharingtalk.com/content/5...fficially-Over

**duke0102** · 12-06-2010, 12:08 PM

If you could get every song on the planet delivered to your door for a Penny there's thousands out there that wouldn't pay that lol
Is cheap music just for the big record labels or is this a sign that ALL music will some day be like this?

**IdolEyes787** · 12-06-2010, 01:05 PM

A few comments ,none of them relevant .

Haters might get a bit more traction...

What kind of legitimate journalist uses the term haters ?

Anyway if he is legitimate I thought child labour was illegal .

..... served up via the cloud.

Next to haters and rotfl one of the most annoying contrivances of recent times.
Seriously this guy is trying so hard to appear young and relevant but by doing so only comes off as immature and trendy .

Nitpicking , not really . I can't picture Walter Cronkite saying something like "On the cloud today it was reported that a lot of haters tried to prevent Black students from attending Little Rock high School, lol "
That's what people write on Facebook , not something that a newsperson says.

When you buy instead of bootlegging, you’re paying the band. Most download retailers send about 70 percent of each sale to the record companies that own the music. Artists with 15 percent royalty deals get 15 percent of that 70 percent, or about 10.5 cents per dollar of sales. Those who write their own music and own their own music publishing companies—an increasingly common arrangement—get another 9.1 cents in “mechanical royalties.” Every download sends almost 20 cents straight to the band.

A recent court ruling against Universal Records—and in favor of the rapper Eminem—might even lead to downloads of older music being treated not as sales but as licensed music. (Newly written contracts tend to address digital music sales directly.) That would bump the artist’s split with the label from around 15 percent to an average of 50 percent. If that happens and you can still rationalize not throwing four dimes Eminem’s way, then maybe there’s another reason you’re still pirating music: You’re cheap.

No ,unlike the majority of people in the recording industry that want my money ,I'm poor .
Should that alone effect whether I steal stuff or not ( btw I'm not a big music downloader - single songs only maybe 50 in a year and mostly nothing current ,so it amounts to little more than using the radio ), probably not, but until the day arrives that musicians don't earn large sums of money , which seems to be mostly wasted on extravagances anyway , for basically doing what you love to do while at the same time I pause over whether I can afford to turn the thermostat up beyond 18C , then I consider my hands mostly clean in the matter.

**Quarterquack** · 12-06-2010, 03:05 PM

As per my comment there:

I won't attempt to absolve myself for responsibility when it comes to the fact that I pirate material. However, it should only stand to reason that I'm not the only party that's in a morally gray area within this entire ordeal. Artists are nothing more or less than a commodity nowadays, a currency for the "big guys" at the music labels to get their fix of millions in dollars. When any company attempts to even so much as change a song (the point of art is inspiration; so unless some of the meaning is lost alongside the transition from being a traditional artist to being a musical artist, it stands to reason that their music is public, once it hits the public) the labels have to be contacted, and have to agree with the decision. Not only do they hold a monopoly on what is done to essentially an organized thought transcended into musical language, they also have this incessant need to "own" more music. I was shocked to find that even composers like Bach and Vivaldi have a legal team from their labels (!) pursuing people who use their tracks, and attempting to pass advertisements at the users' expense. Surely such ruthless, baseless money grabbing schemes have to cease at some point. Copyrighting music in itself is a flawed concept, in my opinion. I do pay for my music. When it's towards someone that matters, at a time that would matter to them. Say a concert, or a private high-end showing; you know, paying for entertainment. As I believe anyone should. However, I find little to no reason to pay people who force themselves into being the middleman, and call the music "theirs'." How could a chord progression be anyone's really?

It has never been about the medium. People were willing to tape record off the radio, for crying out loud. It has never been about the quality; people unwilling to shell out a couple of bucks for a simple track would be much less open to buying an audio setup that costs north of $20k to hear the difference in qualities. It has never been about sampling as radios, friends with cassettes, parties, and people all existed long before piracy came along, and offered a broad (enough) means to experience and discover new music. It has never been about the price, as even with a stable economy people were weary of spending as much as 99c for a track they had sampled, heard on youtube, possibly heard at a club, in different qualities, with different remixes and have memorized. It has always been and will always be about the convenience. The convenience of knowing you can have any track you want and/or need, in any quality you desire, regardless of how pedantic it makes you seem, from any source you deem worthy, readily available for download straight to your computer where you can apply all the DSP's you want, modify the file, then toss it on your sansa clip to take it with you on a run. That convenience that has been set by piracy is unmatched by any other service (if you don't believe me, look at how Kinect is successful based on the homebrew scene, and look at nearly every other aspect of life, from Beer to craftsmanship, where it's not the content producers that but rather the community that fueled the causes, and caused the innovation). But most of all, it has been about the convenience of pricing. It's basically a "pay what you like" scheme. Except, you actually get to decide who gets your money, when and how. You can either support the artists directly in their concerts, or succumb to the corporate takeover of intellectual property.

So instead of trying to win people over into your side of the argument, why don't you ask yourself this simple question: What could possibly challenge a(n) (illegitimate) medium where you have the convenience of quality, distribution, penetration in the masses, medium, source, functionality and pricing all at your disposal to tailor to your own needs? Allow me to answer: A legitimate version of piracy. It's why Spotify is successful in the public's eyes, it's why you yourself admire grooveshark, and why piracy still prevails and sits at a staggering 50% of all internet traffic. At the end of the day, the wrong people are still being supported by these services (well, the former two), but at least you have the illusion of the same convenience; and until the whole system catches up with the needs of the people, the situation will always remain Labels v. Pirates.