Should Downloading Music Be Illegal.
Response to text- Why You Should Pay For Music by John Sheldrick Dear John, I read your article and I have some comments about it I would like to acknowledge about it: Firstly when you mention that you advocate a culture in which people actually want to spend money on music, but I actually think we should advocate a culture where everybody listens to music and not just the ones who have a computer and and a bank account, I believe that music should be a right and not a privilege and everybody should want to willingly listen to music.
Then you argue that people value music but they don’t value it in the sense that they will willingly fork over $1 for a song, I have more than 2 thousand songs in my library, that is equal to 2 thousand dollars and I really don’t have that extra money to spend and people usually don’t like to spend their money on things they can get for free. I would much rather use that money to buy something else and if we had to pay for every single song we would like to listen to our music library would be much smaller and we could not enjoy music as much as we enjoy it when we have a large variety of it.
For the consumer, music is not a product or a service. They pay for physical copies of music such as CD’s, they pay for music sheets or for subscriptions to music services, but they don’t pay for a song by itself. After that you state that artists now have no money to keep recording music and have to go on tours to get the money. I do agree that some artist that are not yet discovered should get support from their fans so they could keep recording music, but aren’t musicians supposed to be doing music because its their passion?
They are not supposed to go into the business because they want money and fame even though I don’t see the artist at the top of the charts starving to death. Music is about passion and the ones who are recording music are supposed to want to bring their music to all kinds of people so they can enjoy it and the musician is supposed to be satisfied with that and not be crushed because they are not the cover of a magazine. I also think that tours are a great thing, why listen to a record when you can go out and the real human behind the voice live and enjoy it more closely.
It’s clear that everybody thinks music should be free, because it’s going to sell everywhere else. Why should the music industry care whether the money comes from a tour with $100 in profits or the exact same amount is brought in from CD purchases? In the end, it doesn’t matter, money is still coming in and can be used to record more music. Then you talk about how music labels are closing because the lack of money they are getting but I actually think that record labels are trying to turn music into gold, music recording labels are getting a large cut of the artists money and are overcharging.
The artist who are not yet discovered cant record a good album because the labels are asking for absurd quantities of money which the artist cant pay, so the label closes and the vicious circle starts again elsewhere. I think labels should spend more time developing the artists because they would have a stake in them that extended beyond their recorded music. There is no possible way anyone could seriously work in music and be looking for money and a the same time state that they truly care about the musicians.
In conclusion I think that we do need to support our artists, but that could be done a million ways other than paying an overpriced dollar for a song. With the internet now how can we be surprised when people now expect to get their music online for free? The internet file sharing and the advantages we now have in technology I see no way to make the clock turned back and force people to start paying again. So the business has to get creative and evolve away from the sale of recorded music and start receiving money in other ways.
