So my friend thinks that internet piracy not only doesn't harm the music industry, but helps it

[xplay3r]

yeah i...i mean my friend...who i never talk to and do not accosiate with...only downloads music to figure out what i....he likes. i...he downloads a song or two, if he likes the music he buys the c.d. if not he'll only listen to that song and not bother with them. If he likes the music he buys the c.d. for three reasons (1. for songs he can't get online (2.for the artwork and stuff (3. to support the artist he likes. If he doesn't like them he forgets them. simple. I would never buy c.d.'s otherwise.....I mean he wouldn't.

 

[cainstwin]

It's possible that you're friend is right; but it really depends on the music they listen too. Have you ever exerted the effort to find a barely known indie band discography? It's a lot of work; opposed to going into Itunes or whatever and sample/buy music from the band that you enjoyed.

It hurts the artist but then again it also promotes the artist; you're really hurting label companies as artists make their money through touring, not selling CD's (it doesn't hurt but it's not their big source of income).

For example: If you were to download a band today that you really like then you'll probably tell your friends about it, and their friends so on and so forth which maybe it will get to people who don't pirate music for whatever reasons and someone will buy their stuff.

ok i went 2 a gig for £10 for a reasonably big band. how do they make a large income out of this?
EDIT: the tickets were legit, thank u ticketmaster.

 

[SmartIdiot]

Your friend needs his head smashed against a wall repeatedely until some common sense and knowledge of what he's talking about seeps in there.

Care to elaborate on that?

Delighted to. Piracy does harm the music industry. Now the industry itself is not important as it's dying anyway, plus big labels have been stealing money from artists for years. THE ARTISTS. Hint. Now they are the ones who get harmed the most, without financial support they will struggle and eventually be unable to continue doing what they are doing just because every fucker wants something for nothing these days.

This is why the DIY approach has become popular again with many people releasing material under their own labels. You'll find a lot of emerging artists also have a job to support themselves in the first few years and then if they're lucky they can drop it in favour of being able to go on tour(then the merchandise helps out aswell, granted), others... well they just roll with the punches and go without food for a couple of days until the ball starts rolling and they can afford to live.

I don't buy the whole 'piracy helps in the long run' arguement as there are a lot more doing it than people think. There's no excuse for it. Right now I can think of at least £100 worth of music I'd love to listen to but just can't afford to right now. I refuse to download it for free (partly because I'm a big fan of album artwork aswell) because I like to think I'm at least giving a little support to the artists I admire.

 

[Rayansaki]

Piracy makes music more widespread, it is its own industry. It, however, does not help most musicians make money.

This is where you and the anti-piracy associations are wrong. Piracy does indeed help musicians make more money. CD sales only account for an extremely small percentage of the musician's income, because most of the profit goes to the record labels.
The big chunk of income musician's have is the live concerts, and by increasing in popularity through piracy, the bands get more gigs and attendance.
I'll admit I haven't bought a music CD in over 5 years, but in those 5 years I've been to at least 50 concerts, and that helped the bands more than 5000 CD sales.

Piracy hurts record labels, but it helps artists.

 

[daz_O_O]

I pirated about 80% of my music collection originally, now I own about half of it on CD or through legal downloads. I found a LOT of music thanks to piracy and there are so many bands on my iPod now that I would never have considered buying or seeing live, but now have done just that.

In some cases people abuse the system and give the music industry no money, I like to think I've found a balance. Some people think I'm a fool for ever spending money on music when it's freely availible, others think I the devil incarnate for even possessing a bittorrent client. I say fuck off, this is my moral code and I like it.

 

[Schnippshly]

I certainly pirate hefty amounts of music. I never buy or download albums. I hear one song, I get that one song, and that's it, I don't get all the albums the song is on because chances are all the other songs are terrible.

 

[CIA]

His argument would be better if he said that culture should be free from commercial constraints and that's why it is everyones right, nay duty, to pirate.

It would still be kind of a dumbass argument though.

 

[Bulletinmybrain]

I don't pirate music, but I've seen a funny thing on 3 last concerts I've been to:
The frontmen actually said something like "It's ok to pirate our music as long as you go to concerts"

Seriously.

It is the truth, album sells go to the publisher, whom does their advertising and pretty much makes the band their *****. Concerts profits go to the band, and small bits go to the stadium.

Piracy makes music more widespread, it is its own industry. It, however, does not help most musicians make money.

You realize that musicians get almost nothing (couple of cents) for selling CDs, right? And don't say "well if 1000 people buy it they get some money!"
Wrong. Even if they got a dollar for every sale, they still would only get $1000, which is nothing, depending on how much each member gets, paying for equipment, paying for gas to go from show to show...
they get no money.

It all goes to the rich greedy record companies.

The only time you can say musicians get money is buy selling their own merch at a show.

Piracy is a win in this case.

QFT

 

[Skarvig]

It helps musicians. People who pirate weren't into buying the music, game, movie, whatever anyways. So they don't really suffer from a loss of money but they actually gain popularity.

 

[GoldenCondor]

Piracy makes music more widespread, it is its own industry. It, however, does not help most musicians make money.

This is where you and the anti-piracy associations are wrong. Piracy does indeed help musicians make more money. CD sales only account for an extremely small percentage of the musician's income, because most of the profit goes to the record labels.
The big chunk of income musician's have is the live concerts, and by increasing in popularity through piracy, the bands get more gigs and attendance.
I'll admit I haven't bought a music CD in over 5 years, but in those 5 years I've been to at least 50 concerts, and that helped the bands more than 5000 CD sales.

You got ninja'd, dude.
read my post.

 

[Berethond]

I don't pirate music, but I've seen a funny thing on 3 last concerts I've been to:
The frontmen actually said something like "It's ok to pirate our music as long as you go to concerts"

Seriously.

Because if you buy a song on iTunes, they get 5-10 cents out of that dollar, but they get a higher percentage of concert tickets.

 

[delet]

People only use piracy in small amounts? Is the entire discography of 5 bands... small?

Your friend is an idiot, that's for sure. I may pirate music a bit, but hey, at least I don't think I'm helping the industry for it...

 

[Inarticulate_Underachiever]

That is complete BS and everyone knows it. One guy downloading a few songs here and there may seem trivial. But try estimating the loss in potential profits when that number is upped to 1 million. In the end this only hurts the music industry because it doesnt reimburse the hard working artists who go to great lengths to make top of the line albums.

Well one (like my friend) could argue that piracy just kills off record companies, not actually destroy the entire industry.

 

[Sockerbit]

Do you have any evidence to support the claim that piracy is hurting the industry? After all research have shown that pirates are overrepresented in the section of gamers who buy more media such as games, music and movies, than the average consumer.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/lp7lwl ***The link leads to a PDF-document, there might be problems with loading it in your browser and some starts a download. Don't click the link if you DON'T want to download the PDF-document.***

At best one could argue that it hurts some individual developers or publishers, but I've yet to see that confirmed by any study or analysis, only speculation and reasoning which goes into the line of "Why would you pay for something you could get for free?" which we know not to be true because people are buying more games than ever and even more so if they are pirates. There is no evidence to show what kinds of games people pirate, meaning we don't know who is hurting from it or gaining from it.

 

[xplay3r]

Id like to point out th yes, maybe they will make sales in concerts and gigs, but the idea of concerts and gigs (for smaller bands anyway) is 2 get there name out there and they make no money from it. The money comes from CD sales.

Yes but look at it from a diffrent perspective.

If your an up and coming band you want to be heard.
If no one hears you then no one's going to buy your c.d. so some kid in, lets say texas, downloads a random song of your's, likes it, puts it on his MP3 player, and then plays it for a friend or two and then those friends play it for an internet friend, say one in pennsylvainia, and one in florida.
They show it to three of there friend each. (same or diffrent state no matter)
Your gaining fan upon fan each listen (assuming your that good or well you know what i mean) then, the one's who pirate resposably ("sampling music then buying it" like most people here say they do) go out and buy your c.d. now you've just made...say 100 sales, because people like one of your songs and want more, instead of a few people hearing your song legaly, and not you might be a slightly larger band, but your still locale and your fanbase isn't nearly as big.


So you get you'r name even farther out there, see what i mean?

 

[cainstwin]

Piracy makes music more widespread, it is its own industry. It, however, does not help most musicians make money.

This is where you and the anti-piracy associations are wrong. Piracy does indeed help musicians make more money. CD sales only account for an extremely small percentage of the musician's income, because most of the profit goes to the record labels.
The big chunk of income musician's have is the live concerts, and by increasing in popularity through piracy, the bands get more gigs and attendance.
I'll admit I haven't bought a music CD in over 5 years, but in those 5 years I've been to at least 50 concerts, and that helped the bands more than 5000 CD sales.

Piracy hurts record labels, but it helps artists.

some quick maths
take the amount of money spent on each ticket
take out a say ... 20% venue cut of the profit. next take another cut for the label. say the same. 60% of ticket left. Now divide by bands seen. say .. 4 15% per band. Now factor in how much travel cost food stay etc etc lots of costs. how much do they make from touring. Now make 1 cd. Sell it 500o times. Which wrks better 4 u?

 

[fix-the-spade]

Well, in a round about way he has a point, sort of.

Through piracy a band can very quickly generate a global following without a record label's involvement. Meaning they an enormous chunk of cost and marketing schtick as the record gets passed around the planet.

From the performer's perspective the big money comes from live concerts and festivals. People are still turning up to live gigs piracy be damned, so from that angle it's helping the bands.


Where it's undermining them is long term, over a period of years (especially if the band splits up or declines in popularity) it's the record sales that will keep an artist's pay cheques coming, even if a chunk of that is lsot to the record label. Piracy is removing a chunk of that, how big a chunk is up for debate (1 pirated copy =/= 1 lost sale, regardless of what publishers think) but it's still lost money. Over time that's going to hurt them.

 

[insanelich]

Your friend is smarter than the average Escapist member. Assuming this topic isn't half-full of astroturfers. Which it could well be.

Anyway, piracy is real bad to the record companies. To the artists? Not so much.

 

[Lord George]

Piracy makes music more widespread, it is its own industry. It, however, does not help most musicians make money.

This is where you and the anti-piracy associations are wrong. Piracy does indeed help musicians make more money. CD sales only account for an extremely small percentage of the musician's income, because most of the profit goes to the record labels.
The big chunk of income musician's have is the live concerts, and by increasing in popularity through piracy, the bands get more gigs and attendance.
I'll admit I haven't bought a music CD in over 5 years, but in those 5 years I've been to at least 50 concerts, and that helped the bands more than 5000 CD sales.

Piracy hurts record labels, but it helps artists.

some quick maths
take the amount of money spent on each ticket
take out a say ... 20% venue cut of the profit. next take another cut for the label. say the same. 60% of ticket left. Now divide by bands seen. say .. 4 15% per band. Now factor in how much travel cost food stay etc etc lots of costs. how much do they make from touring. Now make 1 cd. Sell it 500o times. Which wrks better 4 u?

But that same logic applies to CD's the label takes there cut, the distribution charge, split it between all members ect.

 

[cainstwin]

Id like to point out th yes, maybe they will make sales in concerts and gigs, but the idea of concerts and gigs (for smaller bands anyway) is 2 get there name out there and they make no money from it. The money comes from CD sales.

Yes but look at it from a diffrent perspective.

If your an up and coming band you want to be heard.
If no one hears you then no one's going to buy your c.d. so some kid in, lets say texas, downloads a random song of your's, likes it, puts it on his MP3 player, and then plays it for a friend or two and then those friends play it for an internet friend, say one in pennsylvainia, and one in florida.
They show it to three of there friend each. (same or diffrent state no matter)
Your gaining fan upon fan each listen (assuming your that good or well you know what i mean) then, the one's who pirate resposably ("sampling music then buying it" like most people here say they do) go out and buy your c.d. now you've just made...say 100 sales, because people like one of your songs and want more, instead of a few people hearing your song legaly, and not you might be a slightly larger band, but your still locale and your fanbase isn't nearly as big.


So you get you'r name even farther out there, see what i mean?

okay. but them being nice freinds probably share music. so altho they say have 100s of new fans. they probably contributed about 5 sales. I myself may occasionly "lend songs" like my enire MP3 collection ... but u get my point.