What's up everyone?

I'm required to make a post on a forum of my choice about a controversial topic that I feel strongly about for a class. Naturally, I chose this place, one of my favorite forums for sure!

Anyway, the topic I chose is the illegal downloading of music. Do you think it's killing the industry? Or do you think that it can help bands gain popularity by way of "mass production" I guess you could call it. With YouTube, Facebook, and all these other media sites, is it harder to make it big now? Do record companies even have a place anymore? What about the printing of CDs?

I've heard a couple horror stories from musicians that have been victims of illegal downloading, and they aren't too keen on it. Is it stealing? Is it as bad as stealing a car? Or something like that. What are your views? What do you think?

Thanks guys!

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Rild
Metalhead

Joined: Sun Jul 05, 2009 2:38 pm
Posts: 596
Location: Vancouver 	
PostPosted: Fri Feb 01, 2013 1:17 am 
 
The results are ambivalent. If you are an obscure artist downloading means that much more people will find your music than otherwise would have, but few of them will buy it. I'm not so sure that downloading is the sole culprit behind the music industry's decline. There certainly is a correlation, downloading has risen at around the same time as the record industry has gone in a death spiral, but there are confounding variables. For example, prices of staple commodities like food and fuel have risen quite a lot in the past decade, thus spending on necessities increases while discretionary spending on things like music CDs decreases. If I was spending say half or 2/3 as much on food and gas as I am now I'd have a lot more money to spend on things like CDs, which I would like to buy but can't really afford to given my economic circumstances.