Moving away from the usual webpasting and news sharing: What exactly is moving the explosion of Internet piracy? Is it people who are poor, and more importantly, can't afford current CD prices? Is it mostly teens with too much free time on their hands? If I understand correctly, that's the malleable market-- teens tastes fluctuate wildly with the times, and so the music business aims at this market? After all, older people's tastes in general don't seem to change much. Is it because people would prefer to collect hit songs than complete albums? Does internet piracy cut into music sales, or does it encourage purchasing of new music? On that note, are new acts gaining exposure on file sharing networks? I'm not sure about KaZaA, but I know Grokster promotes new acts on their web site. Or are users just collecting known hits? How *does* copyright law extend to P2P file sharing?23 responses total.
Hmmm. All very good questions. I know that I download songs (from legal sites, although I have friends who've gotten songs from P2P) because I want to hear them but I don't feel confident buying the album -- or the album isn't available anymore or yet... For example, I have several songs downloaded from Pegasus Music's free website of songs from their upcoming albums. Didn't stop me from buying the albums as soon as they became available (I have one that just came out yesterday in my hot little hands, in fact). It just gave me a taste that made me WANT to buy the album even more. In other cases, I might try to find a song because I want THAT song, but I don't want to buy a whole album (case in point -- I wanted a copy of "It's Raining Men" but I couldn't find an 80s anthology that had it nor did any of my friends have a copy). But I'm middle-aged, so I'm probably not the person to answer this item. I'll see if I can get my son and/or his best friend to tell me why they frequent the P2P sites and download far too much music. :-)
Easy, new CDs are often priced up to $18.99 and a lot of them suck. Peopele would rather download something old much cheaper, even if they end up not liking it. It such to pay a bunch of money for a CD when you only want the single.
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I don't know about that -- most of the CDs I buy have more good songs than bad on them, but then again, I'm not buying pop music.
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I ask the question because die-hard fans of artists *don't* generally get the "Greatest Hits" albums like some other passers-by; they more often have the entire recordings. -But- are they in the majority, or would far more people rather pick and choose hit songs from various artists? On the one side, you collect the entirety of an artist's work; on the other side, you rip and burn a more eclectic mix.
You know I hear the "I don't want to pay for a whole album with only two good tracks" complaint often enough but I can't figure out whether the people complaining are just buying music that's very different from what I listen to or whether it's my personal tastes in music but I encounter the problem pretty rarely -- probably on fewer than one disc in eight among those discs I buy on impulse (and fewer still on discs which aren't impulse buys.) Is the quality-to-filler ratio that much higher in whatever popular musical marketing niche people are favoring these days or is there something else which explains why other people find this to be a widespread problem when I find it to be an occasional disappointment?
re #6: ugh. "Greatest Hits" collections are usually nasty. Most of the time I'd much rather have a regular album, even with bands whose work I don't know.
resp:7 Believe it or not, I think there has been discussion on this. I think part of it might indeed lie with the fact that you're listening to vastly different music than the average teenager/young adult is (actually, I think that breaks down to teenager and women 18-35). The notion has been put forward that the music business is gasping for new talent in this market. Current pop artists apparently aren't producing entire recordings that hold their audience's attention. Even in the hit factory decade of the 80's, there was one album churned out where every song hit #1: Huey Lewis and the News's "Sports." We have nothing like that today. Maybe rampant consumerism has burnt out the music business-- they aren't paying enough attention to production quality. My fall to piracy is for very different reasons. I'm poor, and much of the music I listen to is reasonably old. I generally look for hits that are a little more difficult to find right away, and I don't always have patience in trying to find compilations. When I do have money, I do admit that it's worth buying the remaining material in some artist's album, but right now, I'm too lazy and too broke to do it. On that note, current CD prices don't help. Oh, and by the way, I rarely pirate for nostalgia much: many of these old hits are barely on the periphery of my memory. I very much suspect the music piracy problem is firmly in the mainstream; therefore, I'm willing to bet that those who buy outside of it don't quite understand what the fuss is about, or more specifically, don't pirate.
I've never used P2P software but the feature which might one day lead me to start is the potential for access to material that's out of print and nearly impossible to obtain legally. There are several genres I collect where work from even the foremost artists in the field is out of print and essentially unavailable. The work that *is* available is largely released on anthologies which have substantial overlap between collections so between a dozen collections I might wind up with five or six copies of one track and yet be unable to find copies of many others. Joining a P2P network with others who share my tastes would be a huge help in tracking down material I haven't otherwise been able to find. I'd love to be able to buy this stuff from the record companies which own the rights but in most cases either the rights-holder is out of the record business or the rights belong to some tiny portion of a huge conglomerate with more profitable things to do than cater to my personal tastes. I can tell that I'm going to be SOL if I have to count on waiting for the market to provide what I want.
It's very true that my particular tastes in music are definitely non-mainstream and that I'm not in the target range for the music business. I do buy some mainstream (older) acts at times (Rick Springfield, Blue Oyster Cult, Moody Blues... all of whom had new albums out in the last two years) but mostly what I buy is firmly in the folk or world camp. I will branch out into other things if I hear them and I like them, but I'd say that I definitely don't fit any profiles --- I love to fill in those cards that come in CDs where they ask you your name, your address, and why you bought the record, and then what the last three CDs you bought were and what the magazines/radio stations you listen to are -- it probably drives them crazy. "Let's see here, a 46 year old woman who reads, um, 'Time, Cosmopolitan, and Analog'. The last three CDs she bought, not counting this one, were 'Shrek soundtrack, Fairport Convention, and Ilgi' WTF?!" I love screwing with their demographics, and the best part is that I never have to lie. It's also true that most of the music I'm desperately wanting to get copies of AND would be willing to pir-ate, if I had to, is all out of print. I have some tapes of filk music that I'd LOVE to get digital copies of, but it's not going to happen. I know that there are albums of, say, Archie Fisher out there that were released in the 1960s in England that aren't coming out on CD and I don't even know who might have a copy (well, obviously, people in England, but I don't know any! Grin) of the original, so I'd be more than happy to do some pirating of that.
On the subject of albums with only one or two good tracks: I've read in histories of pop that that's one of the things the Beatles changed. Prior to that time, most bands would put only one or two good songs on each of their numerous albums, and anyone wanting a listenable album was obliged to wait for the Greatest Hits. After the Beatles came along, life on pop and rock albums was very different for a good long time, but maybe it's changing back.
Well, it sounds like music that's out of print or difficult to access certainly is a factor. I doubt I would have gotten a copy of Jazzy Redd's "I Am A Dope Fiend" unless I had pirated it.
Let's see... extended soundtrack to Fellowship of The Ring CD at $24.99, not discounted or 4 DVD set of Fellowship of The Ring for $24.99, on sale?
Yes, it was common for vinyl LP's in the early 60's,
to be blatantly fleshed out with crap filler,
covers/copies of very commonly recorded
stuff (Route 66, Hounddog, I dunno, stuff
everybody knew). It was *blatant*.
resp:14 Ouch.
Even Motown LPs of the 60;s where very much 'the two hit songs, the two b-sides and 8 remakes of other Motown artists hits'.
re #17: 60s soul really wasn't an album-oriented genre so that's really not surprising.
Were any genres really that album-oriented in the early 60s?
I'm not aware of any, though that's hardly conclusive..
Miles Davis, John Coltrane and some other jazz guys are the only ones I can think of. And I'm not absolutely sure on the dates.
Oh sure, lots of MOR stuff, like the Phase 4 Stereo albums my dad had when I was growing up -- like an album full of suites of movie soundtrack tunes, or an album of German beer drinking songs. Mitch Miller was likely album oriented, too, though I can't say for sure. And then there was the classical field, and jazz as was earlier mentioned. When were Frank Sinatra's comeback albums, after his teeny-bop years? 1950s, I think.
My parents had in those days two types of albums that weren't filler: classical and show tunes.
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