Seeing as you are part of the music industry I would suspect you may know something about this stuff. Obviously Bittorrents, limewire etc put $0 into the artists hands but what about the Russian sites like allofMp3 or legalsounds? They charge $1 for an album, do any royalties get paid out from these places?

For what it's worth; a friend of mine is a retired Police Commander. He now works as an "investigator for an attorney. I ask what he does. A few years ago, he tracked down guys that had "FTA" television receivers and the went after them, working for "Direct TV"......He now tracks down those that download music and the attorney goes after those with huge civil fines.

For both the TV and Music fans, the attorney sends a letter, often asking for up to $6,000 to make the case go away....For those that don't see it his way, the papers start flying......

After hearing his stories, I don't think I'll download any free music......

This attorney works for the RIAA or is just shaking people down and threatening to report them to the RIAA?

He used to work for Direct TV and is now doing work for some record company. I'm not familiar with RIAA?

More on this topic from the Counting Crows keyboard player, Charlie Gillingham

A couple of weeks ago a fan asked us this question: "As a band that's been around for more than a decade, how have you seen the internet affect the business of making music?" I'm going to try to answer a closely related question: How has the music business been changed by the fact that people can play, store and share music with their computers?

Before I was lucky enough to play piano for a living I worked in the software business, I've also been in the music business long enough to have some idea how it works. I'm hoping that my unique perspective will allow me to show you a few insights that maybe other people have overlooked.

The Music Business Is In Trouble

(1) People spend less on recorded music than they used to. The average person spends only $22.53 on CDs or records or iTunes out of every $10,000.00 they spend. Back in 1994 they spent $37.21. That's a drop of almost forty percent. The difference comes to around eight billion dollars a year.

(2) There has been heavy consolidation and downsizing in the music business since the middle 90s. Historic labels like Def Jam and Motown have been shut down. A huge number of people were laid off as label after label disappeared.

(3) Retail record stores have been steadily closing their doors for the last ten years, culminating with the demise of Tower Records this last summer.

That should convince you that the record business was seriously wounded by something around the same time that most people started using computers to play and share music. Many different things have been blamed: including downloading, burning and sharing CDs, changes in the retail world, changes in radio, compilation CDs, lot's of other things. No one is sure. But here's something to think about: it would be a hell of a coincidence if computers weren't involved -- the timing is just too perfect.

How Computers Changed Music

In 1991, it cost about $2,000.00 to store 100 songs on a hard drive. By 1996, the price had dropped to $86.50 and people started using Napster and swapping files. By 2001 the price was down to $1.50 and you could put a computer in your pocket (an iPod is really just an inexpensive computer in hip new clothes). Today the cost is just pennies. That's the way the computer business works: things get better incredibly fast. Something is science fiction and then it's possible and then it's easy, all in the course of a few years.

In 1996, exactly the same year that it became cost effective to store music on computers, music spending dipped for several years. When the iPod came out in 2001, CD spending starts to sink as steadily as the Titanic did. The timing is, as I said, perfect.

It was clear from the beginning that people just plain liked storing their music on their computers. People don't really want to have hundreds of CDs in bright plastic jewel boxes. They just want to listen to music. All those CDs clutter up the living room, it's impractical to carry them all in your car and it's impossible to carry them all when you're jogging. As soon as it was possible to use a computer to store music, people started doing it. As soon as it was easy, everybody started doing it.

The music business was very slow to recognize what was happening. Late in the game the RIAA (who speaks for the recording industry) cracked down on people who got their music for free. This seemed cruel and pointless to most people, and worse, it hasn't stopped CD sales from continuing to slip.

I agree with those who have suggested that the real problem was never downloading -- it's borrowing CDs. Only 3% of the music on the average iPod was downloaded -- the other 97% comes from CDs. We can't tell if the CD has been paid for by the same person who owns the iPod. You can load in all of your parent's Beatles records and then burn some of them to a mix CD for your new girlfriend and she can share it and so on. Most people don't even think of this as stealing at all, but it is. You've just stolen about $150.00 worth of music access. The RIAA has spent a lot of effort trying to make sure that the 3% is paid for but they've done nothing about the other 97%: we still sell unprotected CDs and people can copy them all they want and there's no way we can stop it.

Why Apple Is Our Friend

In fact, the only place where no one is stealing music is from the iTunes Store. iTunes has excellent top-to-bottom DRM (digital rights management). You can't steal music from it. When some hacker breaks in, they can download new software into all those iPods and fix it. No one else can do this. (Maybe we should only release our music on iTunes and just chuck the CD altogether. But then the problem would be this: not everyone can afford to buy an iPod. Maybe we could talk Steve Jobs into giving away iPods for free so that we could sell more music, rather than Steve Jobs trying to talk us into giving music away for free so that he can sell more iPods.)

Why Apple is Our Enemy

Which brings up another issue that rarely gets talked about. There is a conflict of interest between computer/software industry and the recording industry. They want to make computers indispensable to everyone and music is part of that. The recording industry wants to have enough money to promote new artists and buy big houses. The computer business would prefer that music cost nothing -- it's in their interest, it helps sell computers and software. So we can't expect them to help us get paid unless they are forced to; they don't care if artists get paid or not. Software executives are just as ruthlessly selfish as record executives -- they're in business to make money, too. I don't think it's right to cast the music business as the bad guy here. It's a little more like David and Goliath -- the recording industry is worth a little over 12 billion, whereas the combined personal computing industries are probably worth trillions.

Microsoft wants to make money selling you Windows Media Player so you can listen to free music. I want to make money selling you August and Everything After. Consumers would rather keep their money and have everything for free. Are you starting to get it? It's really all about the money. That's it. Don't let anyone tell you different.

The Magic Land of the Future Where Music Is Free and Software Costs Money

There are people who make some kind of moral argument that recorded music should be free -- that everything on the internet should be a kind of free hippy wiki where we all share and no one uses money and the evil record company Man is banished and all bands are equal and we all get day jobs and live in lofts and make art for love not money. It suggests that no one is morally justified in making money here except the computer business. (The people buy this line tend to be from the computer business.) This is usually accompanied by the gloating observation that this future is inevitable since there's no way we can stop it. The computer industry will absorb the recording business as it once absorbed the typewriter business as a kind of digital manifest destiny ... so embrace it: resistance is futile (as the Borg used to say on Star Trek). This is a dumb argument made by some very smart people.

I'll say it again: it's about the money. Everyone wants the money -- the record business, the computer business and yes even you, the consumers. I don't think the record executives are even the greediest people in the game, despite what most people think. We're accustomed to thinking of them as vipers and confidence men, but I don't think that's really fair. The ones I have met are mostly just people who love music and want to be close to it. Over and over again, record company executives have put their careers on the line to support artists just because they liked the music. That's why original and challenging artists like Jimi Hendrix or Nirvana were signed, it's why Joni Mitchell and Marvin Gaye got to make records their own way. It's why Neil Young didn't get dropped when he had that dry spell in the 80s. It might be why American pop music has always been so full of change and soul and energy; it wasn't shaped by market forces as much as by the tastes of the record company executives who controlled it. Yes, they had the power to force down our throats any music they chose, but the interesting thing is that they tended to use these powers for good rather than evil. I think this fact would surprise most people.

You might have noticed that around the same time that record sales started to drop, music on the radio began change -- you heard a lot of attractive pop stars or music connected to sex and violence (like some rap or hardcore). I think this might be because dropping record sales forced record executives to concentrate more on the bottom line after the layoffs left everyone in fear of losing their jobs. In this climate it seems to me it would be hard to risk your reputation by spending precious promotion money on anything but a "sure thing." I think they may have had to throw out their famous instincts and look for "products" that "test well" in market surveys. Now pop music is far more subject to market forces than it was and the quality has suffered. So it's possible we have experienced an unexpected tragedy -- the death of American pop music as we knew it back in the day.

Luckily for us, we actually have two businesses, a touring organization and recording organization. The touring company has continued to do better and better and we make most of our income from it. The recording business hasn't done as well. We used to tour to promote records -- now we release records to promote tours.

So here's one thing you can do to help out -- go see as much live music as you possibly can. It won't save the record business but it will keep musicians from having to get day jobs.

As Charlie mentions, the cost of storing music has dropped drastically in the last ~16 years. Not only has the cost of storing it on a hard drive dropped, but the cost of putting it on a CD has dropped. Hell, the technology is so cheap now that almost every computer sold today comes with a burner. Yet the cost of the CD at retail has not dropped a comparable amount.

Does that mean the artist is making more profit? No, it means the recording industry is making more profit. And just to add a little more profit, many CDs aren't even pressed in the US any more - that task is outsourced. Are they greedy? Not exactly... they're trying to stay alive with an outdated business model. They need that extra revenue to keep their heads above water as their ship keeps sinking.

I'm sorry that the starving artists are starving, but maybe they should be talking to the people who write their checks. Or better yet, get with the rest of the world and enter the 21st century. The same broadband connections that make music downloading possible are also able to bring movie downloads. So if we can download a 7 gig file now, bandwidth and download times are obviously no longer a problem and we no longer need to download lossy compression MP3s.

Charlie also makes the point that fewer people actually want the stacks of CDs taking up space in their home and office. So why should a consumer pay for packaging that they don't want? Artists should learn how to offer music over the internet with CD quality. The same people that download from iTunes, allofmp3, etc, will be happy to download a full quality track directly from the artist for a reasonable price. And guess what... the artist cuts out the middle man, cuts out the pressing and the packaging, and gets to keep a larger share of the profit. (Of course the downside for the artists is that they would have to be responsible for their own success or failures.)

One point that many people miss when arguing against downloading music is consumer choice. (which is also money related) Why would a consumer want to spend $13.98 (list) for August and Everything After when all they really wanted was the song Mr. Jones?? If artists made their music available directly to the consumers, the consumer could buy and download the tracks he wants, at CD quality, and press his own disc.

Gone are the days of forcing us to buy crap music just because you package it on a disc with your current hit single. Waaaa. The market has changed. Change with it, or starve.

Was on WiFi here at the hotel, now have a Cat5 connection.


I do not download music that I have not purchased. Yes, I have downloaded "Dark Side of the Moon" and some other music, and have it on the laptop on the road, but after purchasing at least 6 copies of it over the years, they made enough royalties off of me.

I usually download television shows (CSI, Las Vegas etc.) to watch while overseas. Its legal in the countries where I am located so no issues. After I watch it, its deleted and I move on.

You may have an issue "opening a port" in that situation. Once you get home cable is automatic. DSL you have to open a port. Tech support can help or pm me..

One question about rights, do you know how many times I've paid for the same "rights" repeatedly when an LP or a cassette or cd was damaged? I already owned the rights. I don't download a lot so I figure the music industry is still on the up-side of that equation with me.

Same here. I bought the same albums time after time, year after year. One would get warped, another stolen, another just plain worn out and so on.

Now everytime I get a new CD or DVD, I make a "backup copy" and put the
original in a secure location at the house. I take the copy and use it in the stereo or DVD player. If someone scratches one or if some idiot steals them out of the car, I just make more copies. The artists made their percentage off of me multiple times on the same item in the past, and its not going to happen again.

Its legal, and I am going to continue to do this to keep more money in my pocket. They made theirs years ago and its time for change.

The article from Charlie Gillingham that I posted above....

I disagree with him on one point: Where he says that people borrowing others CDs to make
digital copies is the most flagrent form of theft....

while this is true...

I know of a few Internet Forums, that are much in the form of this Forum here at Pelican...
where people rip CDs and post the music for "free" available for download.... they use
one of several file sharing services to accomplish the storage and downloading of the songs.

So, in essence this is the answer that the Original Poster of this Thread is looking for:

"where can I download music for "free"? aka STEAL IT

Mass distribution of digital downloads is a bigger problem than people borrowing CDs and
making copies.
________________

Regarding the point that Cashflyer makes in his post above:

"Gone are the days of forcing us to buy crap music just because you package it on a disc with your current hit single. Waaaa. The market has changed. Change with it, or starve."

1) We (the music industry, artists, consumers) are going back to a "singles" industry. This
how it used to be back in the Pre-Elvis Presley days (before about 1955)....

no one bought Albums (very few did) pre Elvis.... then Elvis came along and packaged songs
as Albums, and did not always release the traditional "single"...

this brought huge profits for the industry...and ultimately spurred on creative eras and efforts
such as Pink Floyds "Dark Side of the Moon", "Pet Sounds" from Brian Wilson and his vocal
group... "Sgt. Pepper" "Abbey Road" from some guys from Liverpool etc....

After this creative burst of the 60s, 70s and part of the 80s flourished and then dissolved....
we ended up with artists in the 90s who were for the most part, "posing" and based on image
and rehashing the creative revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s.... but doing it in a very waterred
down manner.... "Its All Been Done" was and is true....

Then the computer revolution happened and the consumer went "wait a minute....these bands
are not putting out full CDs that I want any more...I dont see any "The Walls" or "Whos Next"...
now these bands give me 1 or 2 songs TOPs on a record and I dont want to pay for those
extra ugly songs"

* So it has now come 360 and is a Singles Market again.... until the next musical revolution
or when artists can create entire CDs of great songs again...if that ever happens.

As a musical artist, if the consumer wants to buy my singles and PAY for each one of them...
then THAT is fantastic and what I want..... Singles, Albums...as long as the mechanical royalty
rate is the same...as an artist I dont care...

but there are 2 problems with this a) The mechanical Royalty Rate for Singles is not the same
as albums (a problem that the artist has with ITunes and the record companies)
b) People like the Original Poster who steal tunes off of the internet.

Point 2) No artist ever tries consciously to create "crap songs" ....they, we try to create to the
best of our ability... when the market gets waterred down with pseudo talent and posers, as well
as psuedo talent and posers in Musical production (there are not a lot of Mutt Langes, Ahmet Erteguns, George Martins, Phil Ramones or Arif Mardins coming up in Production these days...
there just are not)..... + the fact that Any Artist can easily create a "professional sounding"
song at home on their computer without any producer or great equipment (using prosumer stuff)..
it takes Collaboration out of the situation to some extent + bands, labels etc. get used to taking
the easy way out by using fast digital production methods that do take a bit of the sweat and
creative ingenuity out of making a record. I personally chalk this up to the Pro Tools era where
records are not engineered, they are manipulated and edited.... therefore sound Pro Toolsy
instead of being created in the mind.

I just give a list of what I want to one of our DJs, they have subscriptions to legally get the music they need, so I get mine legally:D

The RIAA mean business, they send people to businesses, bars, clubs who record the music, then send a copy and a note. That is when it starts:eek:

I have to disagree here. In terms of the big-name pop-fluff acts (Britney Spears, etc.) the CDs are completely loaded with filler *****. Whomever is behind those is definitely not creating to the best of their abilities, or, perhaps, the management is hiring much less talented songwriters to flesh out the rest of the CD. And I don't that's anything new - I think that's been going on since the 80s.

Is Britney an Artist, or a Pop Star?

There in, lies the difference.

Britney goes in, lays down her vocal...(which is pitch corrected and manipulated
to sound "great").... they may ask her opinion on some lyrics, but that
is not definite... so she lays down her vocals and goes home.
The people in charge of her career are responsible for her image and
any creation of "hits"...

the guy that she did her first (and biggest) hits with, Max Martin is a big
Swedish producer known for creating hits for Pop Stars....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

Everything else was manipulation of a career.....

any true musical artist (one who actually writes
the songs) does not consciously try to create crap songs...

they may happen, but for lack of talent and lack of a solid songwriting
or musical concept....but no one would do it intentionally.

I completely agree - but your point above was in relation to the industry in general and the downloading phenomenon specifically, which I think, at least insofar as the RIAA is concerned, in the realm of the pop stars, where the CDs are indeed stocked with filler. A lot of supporters of true "artists" will still go out and buy the CDs, even if they can download them. I know I do. I'm sure there are still plenty of people downloading true artists' work, but, like you said, what pushed people to the return the market to one of singles is in large part an effort to filter out the crap.

CDs are stocked with 'filler' but not for lack of trying... or lack of talent. :)

Maroon 5 for example,...huge band, and they have 1 good song one each of their first 2 CDs
(ok the first CD had 2 good songs but thats about it)....

With regard to P2P, gneutella, and other methods of illegal file share... I don't do it. There's too much risk, and too many poor quality rips (and viruses). I do, however, download from the legal sites (iTunes excepted). Why? As we both made point of, consumers want to buy the songs they like and not the filler.

I may be off on this, and may be underestimating the thieving nature of people, but I think if the recording industry had embraced the internet and the shift to a singles market, the downloading theft would not be as big of a problem as it is. However by dragging their feet and allowing p2p to get it's foot in the door, downloading bootlegs became the norm rather than the exception.