Piracy is a Competitor → Re: I will NEVER advocate stealing BUT

The other problem is that many on the internet won't pay 1 nickel for a song as long as they can steal it for free. Lowering prices may get some people to switch to legal music, but not nearly enough to recover the revenue lost by significantly reduced prices. You see the posts here. The music thieves won't be happy unless the music is free.

I keep thinking about the bottled water industry. In much of the US (what I know personally), you can get water for free - as free as you can dl music - there's no incremental cost or it's nominal.

There are drinking fountains, many restaruants will provide free water, at home you can drink tap water.

So how does bottled water compete? Convienience, quality, and marketing. Now, the music companies already know how to market, but their offerings are loosing out in convienince or quality.

CDs just aren't convienient - I can't get that song I just realised I want to hear in 10 minutes if I have to go to a store, especially if it's 2 in the morning when I want it.

The online stores have DRM which often gets in the way, unlike a CD or CD Rip. I can't play iTMS files on my Zen Vision. I don't need a subscription/lock in with CDs, or the other methods. Then, iTunes and the like usually have lesser quality music that is available via other means.

So, they need to make it a no brainer - faster, easier, and cheap enough that there isn't a lot of agonizing over the cost if they want to beat back piracy. Using the RIAA needs to be easier and faster than searching P2P, it needs to be equal or higher quality rips, and it needs to be cheap enough it's an impulse buy.

The price needs to come across as equivelent in effort and cost to free, or at least not more money than the time spent using P2P to get the same thing.

The one thing is a lot of songs that got down loaded wouldn't get paid for. My friend had an urge to hear the safety dance so he downloaded it. Would he go out and buy a men without hats CD (I doubt you can even buy it any more), no way. If he did would the artist ever see a penny of that, no. In fact cheap trick is one of the bands who won't sign off on this stuff so your free to trade cheap trick any way you want. There are other old bands too that don't care what you do with their recordings.

What a rubbish, illogical crap - 1. what kind of "lost revenue" you have to recover 2.how is that "lost" when you're arguing those would never pay?

ROFLMAO!
Classic circular reasoning - why am I not surprised it's coming from Tjunk...?

A lot of bands don't care yet their labels do. IIRC, some bands (who didn't have the foresight to sign away some of their rights to their labels) have even had conflicts with their labels over this very issue.

IMO, the labels, and NOT bands or songwriters, are THE problem when it comes to the music industry...they know they are dinosaurs and are trying to litigate their survival.

-SC

"Lowering prices may get some people to switch to legal music, but not nearly enough to recover the revenue lost by significantly reduced prices."

Well, golly gee, that's just too bad for them. I guess they'd just have to compete like the rest of us have to and produce a quality product instead of the crap they do now, eh?

This is the same argument used by the government to oppose lowering taxes. The want the money but they dont want to give decent service to taxpayers

"The music thieves won't be happy unless the music is free."

The REAL "music thieves" dont CARE if it's free or not as long as they get theirs. Fact is, the vast majority of downloaders are individuals who download tracks for their own use. The laws are aimed at those that do so to re distribute for profit.
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Why not reduce the price of a high quality downloaded song to 5 cents. That way, it doesn't really make it worthwhile to steal it, and you make up the difference on volume selling, a sort of WalMart effect.