Wall of Mouths

I think it is just plain stupidity and greed.

There are plenty of ways of hearing music by new bands online, but if you like it, buy an original copy and help them on their way.

In my experience the people who only download generally have a few songs of many bands but few bands they have a lot of music of or listen to a lot, and are also not the kind of persons that go to anything but the bigger festivals (where smaller bands won’t play). I think this explains itself both ways; if you’re not ready to spend money on music you’re probably not that serious about it, and the other way around…

I could be wrong, but aren’t good album sales also a bit of a requirement for getting (good) spots at bigger festivals?

I do listen and occasionally download music from the internet, but while it may be technically piracy, I think it’s the attitude or the purpose of the people who are downloading. For me I use the internet in place of the radio or MTV (both of which seem shit these days) to find new music and then go out and buy what I like on cd. I still buy a couple of cds a month (not as much as I used to, but I now have more mouths to feed) It’s probably my age though, if I were younger it’d be just a fact of life that you search for and download music for free. The worst I heard was two employees in HMV discussing a new release that they had in their hands and one telling the other how good the album was and where he could download it for free.

I think a lot of major labels have more piracy problems than smaller ones, but they caused a lot of the problems themselves, they loved it when CDs came out as they cost fuck all to produce and the labels were selling them for £15+ in a lot of cases and their attitude to this was screw you all as there isn’t any alternative for you, now there’s an alternative people haven’t forgotten that attitude. Also the fact is that the only people who really made a lot of money from music sales were the labels and maybe the top 5% of artists, that revenue stream is gone, the labels have dug their heels in and refused to recognise this and change and all they seem to do in response to the changing music marketplace is bleat about piracy. Fuck em, they’ve not bothered trying to find and nurture decent musicians and opted to go with the x-factor style instant stars, if all you’ve got to sell is shite you’re income is going to end up being shite. Also many bands now sell their music (dgitally) direct via services like bandcamp, and using small labels to handle cd / vinyl release, or set up their own label and go down that road, and that’s a good model for the music industry - there’s plenty of great music out there, and a band doesn’t have to be picked up by a major label in order to be noticed nowadays which is a good thing.

Yep, what he said. Piracy won’t go away EVER. Get used to it. Bands are making up their money by charging more for a gig ticket instead and giving away the albums. Thats where its going to go so bands had better be F%^KING AWESOME at what they do!! Hopefully it will rid the world of mediocre music but i doubt it. I think the world will fill with music sold to us by the tastemakers more and more and real music will eventually die. Rock will be ruled by bands like My Passion and other soulless, personailty-less shit and in 12 years someone good will come along blow them all away and it will all be rediscovered again like they did with punk! have faith - it will all come back!! Dont let yourselves get disheartened just because the rock world is currently awful and the only bands selling records in England right now are Foo Fighters, Muse, and Bullet For My Valentine. Like i said - shit ha ha!

buffalo-boy wrote:

so bands had better be F%^KING AWESOME at what they do!!

Yeah, because we all know pirates only steal the bad music…