The Recording Industry Association of America needs to back off.
If you want to read a book, you can go do it for free at a library. If you want to watch a movie, you can rent one from a video store. If you want to look at a painting, you can do so for a rather low price (if any at all) at a museum. And yet, miraculously, people still buy books and magazines and DVDs and paintings and prints and posters.And yes, despite what the RIAA might have you believe, people do actually still buy CDs.
In fact, there has been absolutely no concrete evidence proving any decline in record sales as a result of internet file sharing. There is slight correlational (although no causal) evidence to suggest as much, but there is just as much that will tell you record sells have actually increased since the “Napster Era” began.Basically, the RIAA has not been able to prove that they’re losing money as a result of internet file sharing (though they’ll probably make plenty of money from the thousands upon thousands of lawsuits they’ve filed and continue to file against, among others, children, dead people, and folks who don’t even have Internet access).
In a perfect world, people would be more concerned with making great music great than with being great musicians and great artists, and in general, people wouldn’t be motivated by money. But, unfortunately, art and money have gone hand in hand for some time. Michelangelo probably wouldn’t have painted the Sistine Chapel were it not for commissions from Popes Julius II and Paul III, and Charles Dickens probably wouldn’t have written Great Expectations were he not paid by installment. So if a musician is motivated even partially by money, so be it.
If this is true though, file sharing still shouldn’t be discouraged because, quite frankly, musicians don’t make much money off album sales anyway (though the recording companies make plenty).
Where a musician makes his money—if he makes money—is from ticket and merchandise sales, meaning if an artist really does want money, he needs people to come to his shows. Is it not logical to figure that, if more people who hear your music (whether they’ve paid for it or not), more people will come to your show?
I’m not a marketing expert, and I’m in no position to tell record executives how they should market their bands, but then again, it’s not the musicians who are losing or making money as record sales fluctuate. But as long as the RIAA is going to cry poverty in the name of the artists, they need to start working to actually help the artists.
