On Behalf Of William Crump
The same friend who made those tapes 20 years back gleefully downloads everything he can via various peer-to-peer methods, because his contention is that the music industry as it currently exists is evil, with labels stealing from artists, and the sooner we crush the existing recording industry and cut the corporations out of the loop, the sooner the artists can deal directly with their public.
Well, others could contend that copying, even of mainstream music, is never justified because the record industry is a complex entanglement of economic dependencies. If you're making a CD-R of, for example, the latest Britney Spears release you're not only damaging her royalities! The artists are not the lone cogs in this work - there are the people in pressing plants, in distribution and retail. If the new business models (William mentions one of them) are successful, there will be a lot more folks out of work than just upper-region record company executives [and they're probably the last ones that will have to go ;-)] To call these changes epochal isn't hyperbole, that's for sure. But of course the big companies are far from being innocent of the resentment they are facing. You just have to think about CD prizes, which have been kept artificially high for so long - a real scandal! Regards Franz Fuchs