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Originally Posted by thegathering
I disagree. Musicians are still making millions of dollars off their music. I have yet to see any musician file bankrupt because pirates have taken significant amounts of proffit.
The RIAA blames every loss in sales on pirates and yet there are extremely large communities that are boycotting music to force the RIAA to stand down. The RIAA tends to spin losses even from boycots into more reasons for stricter legislation. Music has always been copied, "pirated", and purchased illegally. That's just an assumed fact of sales.
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Unfortunately, you are not hearing about the muscians who are being decimated by the pirating of music. Most musicians are on the financial edge as it is, if they fall off, or turn to other income streams to live, you never hear about it. It still is happening all the time. How many bands do you remember hearing only one song from? Did you have a band you thought was going to make it big that just disappeared?
Music has only been pirated, copied, etc. when the technology has made it easy. Prior to cassettes it was very difficult. Of course it took a while for the general public to talk themselves into stealing and calling it OK. When people made themselves believe it wasn't stealing and it was easy to do, they began doing it in a big way. How many people do you know that regularly copy music? Say each one of them has caused a loss of revenue this year of 25 cents. How much money does that add up to for this year in lost revenue? Does that sound like the number the RIAA is claiming it cost the industry this year? Musicians are not the only ones losing out on this. I know of at least one hundred recording studios that have gone out of business in the last 10 years. All of their hardware is on a shelf waiting to be sold to recupe the money their investors and banks lost when the businesses folded. That's a lot of people out of work as well. We may not be talking millions, but if you were one of them and you couldn't put food on the table for your family, you would be pretty upset. Everytime you heard someone talk about copying a CD you would cringe.