Untold Music Sharing Success Stories

The music industry with all their petty DRM bullshit... they are so shortsighted. They think every time someone adds music to their library without paying for it, they lose a sale. What they don't see is the sales they gain from having that music out there.

Between web radio, satellite radio, Amazon and iTunes - the amount of music commercially available is staggering. And the competition between artists is fierce on labels both big and small. How is anyone to sample all that music and find what really suits them best before buying? They rip a copy from their friends, that's how. Then through a process of immersion they discover which are worth buying, and many actually do end up buying. Some even buy other releases from the same artist. This equals sales for the commercial outfits that complain about illegal downloads. SALES.

The blockheads at the record companies should be delighted they get free marketing from illegal downloads. People and all their friends are doing the record companies a huge favor. Can they reasonably expect us to BUY every bit of music we are the slight bit interested in? Do they realize how much MONEY that would take us? Of course they do, buy what they fail to realize is that WE ARE SPENDING AS MUCH AS WE CAN on music legally now ALREADY. It's not like huge sectors are holding out on the record companies IF ONLY they were forced to pay for all this music they have.

Fucking idiots.

When I worked in retail, employees got to play their CD's on the store stereo to help the day go by. Believe it or not, this is illegal. Stores are supposed to pay for the right to play that music commercially. Yes. Yet at the store I worked at, we witnessed a different phenomenon. Rather than have corporate-feed DRM radio on all day playing easy listening morphine-drip elevator music, we would instead have customers say, "my God, what is this music that is playing? I love it, it fits my mood exactly, who is it?" and the retail clerk might say, "John Cockburn" or whatever, and - I shit you not - an hour later the person would come back in the store after having gone to Borders and BUYING THE CD. They'd say, "thank you so much. I had no idea this [artist/band/singer] existed, now I have a whole new world of music open to me."

This scenario happened to me with many, many CD's that I had burned off my iMac G3 from shared music. Yet there is no way to record or verify this type of interaction that led to sales, therefore the music industry is blind to it. It's no wonder they think music sharing is so bad. Morons.

A friend and I recently traded iTunes libraries. I gave him all of my non-DRM music and he gave me all of his. 14,000 songs. Most of the stuff he gave me sucks, in my opinion, and much of it got thrown in the trash. But there are a few good ones in there, and because of the nature of websites like Pirate Bay where he got them from, many of them were incomplete albums or have songs with poor quality, or worse, songs that cut off half way through. (Tangent Rant: don't the music execs know their enemy? Pirate Bay and Limewire have mostly shit quality - if anything that my friends' who rave about it gave me is any indication.)

But the best ones, the new discoveries for me, the artists forgotten or not yet explored - they got my attention. And I've bought several of them to complete the album, or improve the quality, or others in an artist's collection that I have wanted to buy. Sales from music sharing that would have never happened otherwise. Artists I never would have known existed without music sharing.

The music industry needs to wake up and smell the CD's burning.