If I pirate a CD, then in a few months go to a show, buy the CD and maybe even get it signed, why is that wrong? That’s what I and many, many other people do. The artist makes more money because they get to keep the retail markup as well as earn the royalty, and I got to see a performance that was more often than not worth what I went through to make it there and bring home a CD that I don’t even have to open and thus can let go of the anxiety associated with scratches and loss. It’s so win-win that any argument against this seems completely ridiculous.

When I see logic like the above and some other opinions expressed on this thread, it makes me wonder if the RIAA has people out scouring the Internet for these types of discussions. The majors have been raping artists since their inception and that’s been fine for, what, 60 years? Because the result is that the public gets an endless stream of music, flashy concerts, and superstars. Piracy doesn’t directly enable this, so people come out of the woodwork when it’s brought up to suggest that it’s wrong, and you’re screwing the entire world over by being involved in it, which is borderline ridiculous.

This point has been beaten to death and the truth of the matter here is that labels are going to adapt, or cease to exist, and they haven’t really shown a lot of willingness to adapt. Sometimes you have to accept less to hang on to anything at all, and if industries as large and powerful as the music industry were to put the effort they’ve spent on fighting change into embracing it, they’d probably have long since turned this whole Internet thing around to be in their favor, and single moms wouldn’t be getting 90,000$ judgements against them. There are plenty of ways to monetize something as pliable as music that don’t involve selling recordings of it and that would potentially be of greater benefit to the artists themselves. I’m not even saying that CDs shouldn’t be for sale – some people *like* to buy them – but I am saying that the labels need to look at the purpose of a CD in their bottom line differently unless they feel like chasing mp3s around the Internet forever, which is completely pointless. I think our collective experience with technology so far has pretty much proven that if it can be done, it will be, when it comes to media and software. That’s just the reality, despite it’s status as right or wrong, IP theft or informational liberty, it doesn’t matter. The sky is still blue and people will never stop downloading music for free.

That’s all I have to say on this, especially since we’re all about to get turned into margin notes by DL’s WordPress theme.

That said, I still purchase cd’s from artists I really like.