@Vitaliy_Kiselev Exactly my point

@VK I'm totally agreed with you on that; and it needs to change..!

@spirit I don't think it was just a preventive strike on that new business venture. There are some alternatives to music distribution that take only 10-15% on sales (ie: bandcamp), and we don't see that many "artists" (by that I mean mainstream) jumping ship*. Mainly because these artists are signed on labels which are very restrictive on their contracts; contracts which are usually very-long term and pretty hard to get rid of.. so the critical mass would not have been enough. Besides these traditional labels offer way more than distribution: production, marketing, tours.. so offering a way to sell creations (and just that) isn't enough: think about it, what sells more: the hyped artists signed on a major label or the band doing their quality music and putting for nothing online? Regarding Kim Dotcom, he might be a very good at building businesses; but I think doing it the way he did shouldn't be something to be proud of (the exact same thing goes to these companies enforcing copyrights).

*even with such a big potential user base, they would advertise the site & service and some if their key artists.. certainly not every Joe who sells music from there.

This is brilliant: https://twitter.com/#!/jonathancoulton/status/160374297364414464

Any other musicians out there notice that ever since they shut down MegaUpload, the money has just been POURING in?

You bet I did. A few more thousand legal downloads of my songs and I’m buying an Arri Alexa. Boy am I relieved they closed that pirate den down!

@EOSHD

Any real examples?

My own expirience suggest exactly reverse situation.

Yes it happened to a friend. MegaUpload build a very profitable business on the back of stolen property. I think the free and open internet should be protected and I think Wikipedia were right to try and stop SOPA - last thing anyone needs is for professional law industry to seize on fucking the life out of people - but also SOPA has a point in that creators of original IP have right to make money from their hard work.

China is probably worse offender when it comes to copying US intellectual property for their own capital gain, to benefit of consumer and Chinese business, but zero benefit for the people who actually put the hard work in to create the products in the first place.

I am not talking about the government. That is irrelevant to the point I am making and so is providing private details about a friend. I've made my point. It is wrong to deny small content creators money.

Frankly if music downloaders can't be bothered to pay 79 cents for a track they want, they are just being childish, penny pinching and incredibly selfish. A lot of artists don't care about being fantastically rich, they just want to get by and feed themselves. If it becomes impossible to make money on music and video thanks to piracy, then there won't be any artists - the only ones left will be the wealthy mainstream ones. Piracy hurts the small guys as well, of that I have no doubt.

Have you ever been a victim of piracy Vitaliy? I'd wager that everyone in this thread has benefited from it as consumers, so only see it from one side.

And yes US government is evil... MPAA is evil... Google is evil... So what. It is the artists I am concerned about.

@EOSHD

I'm sorry about your friend, but spending money on studio time before anything else isn't the wisest of decisions in this era. He would benefit from the kind of information you can find for instance in Owsinsky's Music 3.0, which covers new distribution models after the music industry as we've known it has collapsed (and rightly so because it did not any longer deal with music but with quarterly figures and shareholders) http://music3point0.blogspot.com/

Not necessarily. Bittorrent might have helped him spread his music. It's been known that many record companies secretely dropped their own releases on bittorrent for distribution.

But the whole distribution model has changed and you need to be able to work within the new model in order to take advantage of it.

@EOSHD

Again.

Can you, please tell us details about your friend and his losses.

Otherwise it doesn't look good.

IMO, it is simple problem of the consumer wanting more, faster, anywhere, anytime, for less. The internet is PERFECT delivery system for what the consumer wants, but the old farts upstairs would rather poop their khakis than give more for less. They're scared. They don't want to change the way they make money, because it is unknown territory. The consumer is sick of old farts, and has therefore built their own way of getting what they want, faster, anywhere, anytime. And since the consumer is doing this themselves, they may as well make it free, right? Why charge yourself? If the industries had kept up with meeting demand trends, there would be far less pirating, and there still could be. The old farts still have the ability to deliver what the consumer wants, the way they want, faster, anywhere, anytime, and in far better quality than the consumer is currently doing themselves. The old farts need to suck it up and stream their content on demand, either for very cheap, or for free with advertisement. They will never be able to stop pirating, especially not by waging war on it. Pirating is mostly not bad people, it is frustrated people with some cheap bastards mixed in. Give frustrated people what they want, and they will take it, even pay for it.

Netflix is prime example of way-behind old farts. Netflix has limited and pretty B-movie selection available for streaming, and even limited DVD/Blu-ray delivery thru the mail. People are beyond this kind of "one stop" service that does not really have everything. If I want to watch a film, I ought to be able to Google it, find an official site, pay a small amount, and watch it in good quality, when I want to. Same for TV shows. People are beyond subscriptions. One minute I want to watch something owned by NBC, the next, something by someone else. I don't want to have monthly subscriptions to everyone's different site just to watch their stuff when I want to. Sometimes I only want to watch one show, one film, one episode on a whim. Pay per view or advertisement, IMO, are their two options.

As for music, the big industry is dead. Decent people already have stopped giving a crap. Go spend your money on a local band's live show. They're good, it is a better experience for your money, it is live music, and they're probably more passionate about their music than big name artists. Live is on the rise, jump on the train already.

anyhow, thats my 25c.

I'm not contesting, nor justifying. I for one do not download for free what someone rightfully deserves to be paid for. But you have to admit that current methods of official legal content delivery are rather archaic compared to a simple "google it and download" that one can do via these file sharing sites. It makes sense that many people do not pay for content, simply because it is such a process most of the time. They want it, and they want it NOW. pitch them an advertisement five minutes in, or let them pay in one simple click.

B3Guy I agree. I have licensed software and in some cases use the pirated version because it's so much easier to load and operate. The license stuff in some cases has these stupid hoops to jump through.

Correlation is not causation, @EOSHD. Have you read Microsoft's Darknet paper? It was published in 2002, but is still quite relevant. Basically, not only are underground distribution systems free, they're faster and the product you get is often better quality than the product you pay for.

I live in a city full of musicians, most of my friends are musicians, and not one of them thinks that filesharing is hurting their ability to be musicians. Why does someone become a musician? To sell albums or to have people listen to those albums?

The model of printing your music out on CD's and selling them in shops is dying and being replaced with something else. Most artists were not making money before, some few corporations were. Artists would make money on touring, which isn't the easiest thing, but that hasn't changed at all, and if anything, touring artists are helped tremendously by the additional exposure of free art distribution and promotion that bittorrent and other technologies offer.

Also, if he finds that people are downloading his music without paying for it after, without an increase in merchandise sales, or an increase at the doors at shows, it might be that people are listening to the music and that they decide they don't like it - which is a wonderful choice to give to people.

What I'd want to see is this, with the appropriate privacy protections: a system which monitored what was being downloaded or which files were being streamed. It already exists, the ISPs pretty much already have this information and it is trivial to compile it. Then, charge a small tax on broadband connections or TV's or the like, and distribute that collected tax across the artists appropriately. It would be hard to make happen in the US, I think, there are just too many big moneyed interests that would be out of power.