(L) said:
Digital music may be copied without significant loss in audio quality. That allows copying on many levels - from burning your favorite playlists to a disc and maybe even sharing it a bit with friends all the way to copying, reselling, distributing so that music sales are hurt. Plus, with Internet transfer rates going up, folks are afraid of P2P and all that shuffling illegal music around, as it does movies, for example. Many CD's don't have that kind of barrier, but then, getting a CD into your computer and then redistributing it, though possible, takes more work.
More importantly, though, Apple has a right to sell music that will only play on iTunes and on iPods, because if consumers did not want that, they would eventually go elsewhere. Other companies are also free to try to figure out a device that will play the music from iTMS - but they don't need to be given the instructions to do so by Apple. Ultimately, if you wanted cheap, easy, drm-free music, you'll have to hope for a competitor that will stay around. It's a restriction on consumer use, but my point is that it's absurd to purchase from Apple and then demand that the tracks play on a Sony. Talk to Sony about that, not Apple. People just don't understand that they are not buying away the ownership of art, but rather ownership of the data that would allow you to listen to the music, provided you can get the data to play on your end.
...well, this could go 2 ways: either you buy (and thus own) the data that enables you to play the song, in which case the data is yours to do with as you please, or you buy a copy of the "content", i.e. the entity that this data represents, in which case there can be legal regulations involved on the copyright of this data. personally, i think that it is a combination of both, since you are not allowed to freely copy the data around, but if you were to lose that data, you would be entitled to a new copy of that data at no/minimal extra costs, because you paid for the content already.
a bit off-topic, but i have to say this:
please people, i very often read all about this "piracy hurts the music industry so bad" stuff; i can tell you that this has a minimal effect on the amount of money that is involved in the music industry.
now, don't get me wrong, i too think that piracy is bad, but the amount of money that is being charged to customers for cd's/dvd's etc. is outrageous. i can tell you from years of personal experience (i'm a professional studio sound engineer - i record cd's for a living), that you could go a long way with, say, 50 grand for a complete, highly professional cd recording. That's nothing! relatively speaking ;-)
So why do all these new cd releases cost so much? because high-profile artists and label managers think that they should at least make 10 million dollars profit on each album release. i realize that i am biting the hand that feeds me, but this situation is enormously out of proportions. we pay a premium for a J-Lo album, so that she can have an extra hairdresser in her 40+ people travelling entourage. i still comb my own hair every day, and wouldn't have it any other way, lol
🙄
what i want to illustrate with the above is, that although there is a lot of music being downloaded illegally, the actual salaries of managers and artists only went up instead of down. now, who can tell me how this is possible??
