joebob, I think you've got a lot of things wrong with your arguments:
1. "Just to name one hypothetical, imagine going to your local music store to find that they no longer stocked material based on any rhyme or reason, nor did they coordinate their inventory to resemble any other store. You get to sift through thousands of CDs stacked floor to ceiling, most of them containing utter crap and very rarely do they contain a gem."
- Well, that's basically what has happened for the last 20 or so years. At one time, record companies were there to help people like you and I sift through the piles of crap that was produced so that we had quick access to good music. However, that is totally not the case anymore. The fact of the matter is that the record companies are the ones producing the piles of crap, which people with a good ear for music must then sift through to find the rare gems. I don't see how they should be rewarded for making bad music.
2. "Oh, sure, you could just hop on nap-tune-zaa and download the music from them, but it's a riddle of millions of different filenames, rarely organized by artist or album, with no way of knowing what other people liked aside from the download count, which may tell you it's a popular song or it may tell you it's a video of a cat doing a backflip that got blogged about a million times."
- Well, that's why we have concerts and word-of-mouth. It seems to me that word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool. If a friend of mine or someone who is a regular in my scene suggests that I check out a certain band/song, then I can check it out. Then I believe that I can decide whether to spend the money on a concert ticket. (Not forgetting the added bonus of seeing opening acts there as well to help promote a group/artist I may not have heard of) But, I certainly have never had any problem finding good music to download through file sharing programs. In fact, most of the bands I listen to rely on the internet for exposure.
Last but not least 3. "Yet, somehow, it only became fashionable to stockpile tons of pirated music right about when computers and internet connections were fast enough to handle transferring them in short periods without much cost. And strangely enough, pirating movies didn't take off until a few years after that, right around when the bandwidth and disk space caught up."
- Well, if you ask me, the cost of most products have gone way down comparatively, if you look at prices we used to pay in the past. Computers and technology have completely changed the way we do business in the world. Unfortunately, the big record companies are still holding onto an antiquated buisness model and trying to overcharge on a product that the cost just isn't properly reflected in the price that we have to pay.
I could guarantee that if record companies were pushed to the back end of the music industry, and people knew that a lot more of their dollar (or pound, euro what have you) was actually going directly to the artist, you would actually see not only a drop in the cost of music, but a willingness by people to go out and buy the songs that they love to listen to.
So, before you come onto a forum filled with a group of people who (for the most part) understand what exactly is going on with regards to music/movies and drm, please try to get your facts straight by understanding what is really going on between the entertainment business and the consumer.
Thanks.
)!
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram