Musicians, songwriters: Ruling rocks

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Just take it for what it's worth

My post was simply meant to point out that we should probably take the musicians's opinions with a couple of grains of salt -- just as we should the opinions of partisan politicians in discussing evolution.

When a group has an active agenda and a loud voice, I usually discount their opinion as compared to parties with well-considered opinions backed up by facts.

Read through the article and you'll see nothing but "this decision is great" from artists, but not a single fact to back up their opinions. It's a lot of "of course downloading hurt me" and no proof.

Perhaps they've used facts to back up their opinions, but none are mentioned in the article. But as a veteran of at least five years of discussions on these boards and in my private life, I can tell you that not a single person has ever convinced me that P2P file-sharing is bad for the musicians.

Here are the facts that I use to back up that conclusion:

1. Not one single study has proven a correlation between downloading and dropping CD sales. And even so, a vast majority of artists make very little money from CD sales (concerts are where they make their dough).

2. When the economy turned sour in 2000, the RIAA blamed downloading for a drop in sales. And when CD sales started increasing while downloading was still going strong (a few years later), the RIAA changed the subject to all those lost millions from the previous years.

That led me to conclude that their original argument was a smokescreen and was flawed.

3. Over the years, a very small percentage of artists have spoken out against file-sharing. In point of fact, I believe I've read more of them supporting file-sharing than denoucing it -- mostly because they saw the marketing advantages that the RIAA missed.

Posted by: bidemytime   Posted on: 06/27/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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