first off, i just want to say i've read this entire thread and i agree with everything axver, marty, and tourist have said.
i really don't know what to say that probably hasn't already been said several other times, but i feel as someone who buys music i should contribute to the discussion. yes, i buy music and support artists in other ways too. yes, i've downloaded illegally in the past too.
i'll be frank. the whole reason i don't do it anymore is because my isp is an asshole and blocks torrents. i could use a program like limewire or what have you but that'd take forever to download an album. that may sound harsh but it's true. so now my only resort to obtaining albums is to pay for them, most of the times without hearing them, or ask a friend of mine (which is a huge imposition) if they can download a torrent for me and then send me the album.
the thing is though, given the choice, i do like obtaining music legally. of course i'm flat broke and in a ton of debt, but even back when i could still go to my favourite torrent sites and open as many torrents as i wanted, i'd either do that to check the artist or album out, and then end up buying it, or if i knew i'd already like it, i'd just buy it.
amazon is great for having cds at amazingly cheap prices, for the most part. most of the times cds are like $9, which is the same as it'd cost on itunes, plus with no tax and free shipping, it comes out to less because with itunes you've got to pay tax. so i wait the two days for it to ship and then i have a physical copy and i can burn it in whatever format i desire.
but itunes sucks. itunes plus is a great concept, but nine times out of ten, the song i want isn't available in that format. i think it's only emi that's jumped on that bandwagon so far? so that's one out of a few big record companies. i've bought so few in that format, i can't remember if those songs cost more or what. and the regular songs, 99 cents is too much. as it's been said, to pay $9 for a 9-track cd (a standard for older albums it seems) in a lossless format (which that part i don't care about, but it's the principle of the thing), and i get nothing extra in return is lame. no packaging, no bonus song, nothing. so for the most part, i use itunes to buy that one song i would've downloaded other ways instead. what's annoying though is, and it's not itunes' fault, how many artists or labels or whatever are still not available. they'll have all tracks on an album except the one you want. or the one popular song is album only (like on a greatest hits or a soundtrack, i'm not talking about the itunes box sets). all these years later the itunes music store is still so shitty. i've bought hundreds of songs and a few albums from there, but there's tons of changes i'd make if i had the ability.
the problem is though, none of it would stop the downloaders. for me personally, i'd lower itunes songs to 79 cents apiece, and that'd be great. it'd increase their sales, but it wouldn't stop downloading. even to 50 cents wouldn't stop. i don't even think if they sold songs for a penny for like a week illegal downloading would stop during that time period, because you'd still get people doing it just out of principle, which is ridiculous. if itunes ever did something like, offering songs for a penny, i'd rush through and buy songs like mad, songs i think maybe somewhere down the line i'd like, just because it'd only be a penny!
illegal downloading i think is a double-edged sword. i mean i already admitted i've done it in the past, and i'd resume doing it if my isp wasn't blocking it. but still, it irks me to see it happening so rampantly, to see people lazily posting threads in the mp3 forum asking for official song after official song instead of buying them on itunes for $1 or something. i guess it's because i started doing it in the golden age, back when there was napster and you didn't have to ask people, you just logged on to the program and typed in your song and there were 1000 people with the song and you could pick and choose how good quality of a song you wanted. the one you downloaded sounds like shit? there's 100 others in the bitrate you want available with tons of people available to share it, so you can try again.
anyway, this has been possibly the longest post i've ever made, and incredibly rambling. but there definitely needs to be a change made. part of me doubts anything will change, at least on the business side. they'll just keep grasping at straws and try to get it back to the way it was in the 80s and early 90s when people bought tons of albums and it wasn't possible to download music online. ugh.
