Ok, it's like this : The so-called "cartel" offer a product that people either pay for or not. If the CD is $20 or $2... it doesnt matter. You don't have to pay for it if you dont want. Also, the artists don't have to sign the contract if they don't want... they don't have to sign-away their rights to their intellectual-property if they don't want. There is no "slavery" involved. You have the freedom to choose, no matter how so many young malcontents want to paint it.

...and you could argue that the whole idea of wearing clothes in public is unnatural or that not being allowed to kill another man over your dinner is unnatural. We live in a society with laws, not a jungle.

There is liscensing involved in radio stations playing music over the air.

People first and foremost need to abide by the law of the land and not perpetuate illegal music distribution. If you don't like it, contact your elected representative and make your voice heard, and above all : VOTE. You don't have to purchase CD's. You don't have to perpetuate an antiquated business model. The power is yours as a consumer and a voter. Breaking the law and throwing a fit like a child is not a solution.

I say we all boycott the RIAA and don't buy their crappy music, oh wait we are doing that...

Ok just make a site where we can trade it.... hmmm

Ok make a VPN with your friends locally to do private file swapping!!

I say we all get back into audio-tapes! Yeah, they were set to destroy the music industry - so let's put it to the test? Stop downloading now and TAPE IT! TAPE IT! TAPE IT! (does an awful impression of Beavis from MTV's B+B)

i have a solution to all our problems.

college radio. if someone called in to my show and said "yo, can you play this whole album so i can get it on tape/cd?" and i'd be liek "sure thing man" and go smoke a cigarette outside.

good ol FCC gives us free broadcasting rights with no cost.

as for the mp3 issue. the only way to ban mp3 uploads is to ban the mp3 format, and all programs and knowledge of those programs. you'd have to brainwash the whole world. if they make uploading songs illegal, i would still do it. i'd still copy cd's for people i know, email people cd's, etc etc. it will get around. the soon the industry realizes this and accepts it, the sooner they can get around to milking it for all its worth. they are just paranoid about it because they haven't quite figured out how to use mp3's to their and the consumers benefit. there has to be a middle ground somwhere that satisfies everyone.


personally, i buy alot more music since i started dowlnoading mp3's. ALOT more albums. in fact, i don't think i bought more than 2 or 3 albums a year before mp3's, and now i spend most of my paycheck on music. and its because i am confident i know i'm getting what i want.

also i think that the record companies wouldn't be crapping their pants about mp3's if they didn't produce such crappy music in the first place. people are turning to other sources because their normal breastfed source is getting dry and stagnant.

and someone earlier on said they wanted to buy from small independent labels, but didn't want to buy online, just about everything you can buy online you can buy offline. go pick up a copy of maximum rock and roll, or some other zine and it ought to have a huge listing of labels/distros. i've never had a problem with buying online. i think i almost prefer buying online. it appals to my laziness factor

Hmm I think I will have to get to know my local college radio DJ's better. It is nice to have a radio card in my PC too.

Well I hope no one just sits around and lets them bully everyone. I mean geez they went after a grandpa, a roommate and a father threatening them with "we will sue you into submission" orders.

Just my 2 peneth!

Why do Music cd’s in Britain cost so much in the shops? The average music cd in the average British music shop “HMV” on average costs you around £13.99 that’s roughly 22 US dollars – I’ve heard that they cost around 9 pence to make – that’s less than 1% of what they retail for – of course, somebody is going to mention all the bits in between from the cutting of the cd to the shop – I can’t help feeling though that for too long the Music Industry has hidden behind this “costs in the middle” bit to get away with charging us massive amounts in the shops relative to what they should be charging us (IMO about 30-40% of what they currently charge us in the shops). Then the music industry moans about people getting their music for free on the internet etc, piracy etc ect and hence comes their enthusiasm for DRM – whats so foolish about this is that most people probably don’t mind paying a little for their new Oasis album ( I DON’T MIND) – but they don’t want to pay 15 quid!!!!!!!!!! – I would be quite happy to pay 4 or 5 quid for an album from a shop – but not 14 or 15 quid!

Especially when you consider that the price you paid for a CD when it was a new technology was not drastically more than it is now - how does the (UK) music industry account for this fact? The price you pay for a CD in the (UK) highstreet is in no way directly attributable to the cost of manufacturing, distributing and promotion.

It is a fact that the record industry has doubled it's sales in the time from 1991 till now. No other traditional industry went so much up, undisturbed by several resecions and such.
Funny fact that CDs cost mostly that same all the world around, in the US, in the UK or for example, where I live in Switzerland. How can that be? Simple, they got the monopoly. and one thing a monopoly does:
It drives up the prices, slowly, unnoticably, never let's them go down (why, if you don't have to) and tries everything to protect the status quo.
A monopoly is by definition by me:
you make 5x money for working 1x, because you can charge anything you want, because nobody can get the merchandise at any other place.

I believe that now the record industry has struck ground and water is slowly leaking in. This ship won't go with the speed it once did.
They have had fat years nonstop and now the anticrist for them has arrived: mp3

Mp3 is the same for them, as Linux is for Microsoft: A thing you cannot kill with any means.

Mp3 is superior to the CD, especially if you use it for the car and/or don't enjoy becoming a involuntary discjokey. But they keep selling CDs, even though people like me don't see any need for CDDA in it's bloated wav format anymore. Give you an example: Just buying the lord of the rings collection, 52 hours of speech, is unusable in the original CDDA format: 10! CDs. Do I look like I will carry around 10 CDs? I had of course to crunch it down to MP3, 32 kbits, which still sounds (for voice) incredible considering it's size. 1 CD it is now. Of course you can copy MP3 much easier. But you can also copy a CD, so what the heck? Copying will always exist. Point! (as it has in VHS, tapes, books etc.)
Let them put a few cents on the CD raw media and be quiet.

Now they are smelling the stench of their own demise, at least of their great reduction.
Creative pause (look at what they are trying to sell these days ;-) and unablility to meet customers demand will greatly kill them... (not kill dead though, big fat things never vanish completely)
You hear in the media all the time that they lost 25% of their sales due to illegal P2P and that is not proven, but a sure excuse. Hey, there is recession, and the mentioned creative hole.
Microsoft is also loosing loads of money to linux, only that being legal and a nice way to say that linux is superior, so they don't mention it like the RIAA does.

Customers want to download music pieces.
Why they are not adjusting to it and offering it online?
Simple, think about it: They would have to offer the songs for much less. Any kid could calculate that it takes less cost to give songs online instead to have to produce CDs and ship them. So it would mean that they had to cut their unjustified profits and that they don't want.
They are now the same as Microsoft, once a great aid in anybody that wanted to use a computer easily (i.e. listen to your favorite dude), now they have become a gigantic bloodsucking monster that takes out more that it deserves. Enslaving instead of helping.

The record companies dream of one thing now: a format that you can download and after that, not copy. Maybe even with an expiration date that destroys. The best is called Digital Rights Management, reeks of Microsoft and stinks to high heaven in my opinion.

The wet dream of them is that you have to rent everything, constantly repeatedly have to pay again and again.
M$ intentends to include these in the next version of Windows and connect it with a Chip on the motherboard, that makes sure these things are enforced. Very interesting to watch what is going to happen then, because the prison cell door that is windows (that now stands wide open, giving many people the impression that it is a nice comfy appartment) will then snap shut and linux will become the free independent OS that you choose if you are not shitting money or just planly like to be master over you computer.

This DRM will make OS manufactures shitty. Government adopting the enforcments will join them and start to suck in a big and grand way too....
As we can be sure, there will always be a way to be free, encryption and private anonymous networks will always be there and we might all hope that one day, some monopolies will be split up by some competiton loving goverments, that do not just care how much money they can cash in by being nice to big business.

i'd also like to say that for the super famous artists who justify 20 dollar cds with "we work really hard and its our intellecutal property, why shouldn't we get the money?" and i say they don't work hard at all compared to hundreds of thousands of unknown bands strugglign to make it.

I think some of you are just brainwashed into thinking that some of the so called music on the market today is important.

It's not.

Sometimes you have to turn off the loud thumping and listen to your own thoughts.

check out vast. finally one musician who realized that the internet isn't a bad thing and is selling a cd of music via paypal for 2.99. 3 dollars for a cd worth of music. that is the way that music should be.

trinity