To Pay or Not to Pay For Music, That Is The Question

Recently an NPR intern let it be known that she has over 11,000 songs but has paid for just a few. Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker's David Lowery took exception to that because people like her are essentially ripping off the artists.

Lowery wrote, "Congratulations! Your generation is the first in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to weirdo freak musicians!"


This might be a generational thing as I've paid for most of my CD's/Itunes (and LPs and cassettes before that). I used to tape off the radio back in the day (WNEW...New York) which was always a hit or miss proposition or borrow LPs from the library to make tapes.

I side with the musicians here. For many it's a dog-eat-dog, low-paid business and any missed royalties is like getting ripped off IMO.

http://entertainment.msnbc.msn.com/...ern-owns-11000-songs-paid-for-only-a-few?lite

I no longer steal music mostly because I have everything I could ever want and I've reached a place where current music has become less and less interesting. When I look at some of my napster downloads I can see that it was actually a benefit to some artists and nothing more than highway robbery to others.

For a band like The Replacements it worked out pretty well. I wouldn't have bought the entire Replacements catalog and all of Paul Westerberg's solo stuff if it hadn't been for that handful of 'Mats songs I downloaded after seeing an old MTV video.

For others, like said Cracker, yeah it didn't work out to0 well. Isn't it really their fault for having like 1 good song?

I paid for most of my music, just because music died after New Wave and everything since the Cranberries sucks. I've made digital copies of my music and have given some of those directly to friends, which seems analogous to making a tape off an LP.

I buy my music cds from Amazon and buy music from my Ipad from Itunes. I am very happy doing this.

I'm one of those people who likes listening to albums over single songs and mix tapes. I hated buying a CD and then not liking the album. So I started downloading from file sharing sites. I stopped buying CDs and would only use buy from I-tunes if I couldn't find something I was looking for through filesharing.

When my old computer went kaput I lost interest in keeping music digitally, but several years later Spotify sort of rekindled my interest in checking out music again.

The thing I liked about filesharing and Spotify, (which I guess now has replaced filesharing for me) is that it let me learn about new music without the punishment of buying something I didn't like. It has let me build up my knowledge of old and new music without having to spend a small fortune to explore.

Now I buy music again, but I got into vinyl now. I quit smoking and budget what I used to spend on cigarettes to buy a few records every month (a mix of new and used).

I can understand it sucks for the artists when people do steal the music and think it's better to buy - but with the freedom to check out first. In my case that increased accessibility has helped me build an appreciation and appetite for exploring more music that I wouldn't have otherwise had the interest or the means to do.

Damn - should've never thrown out my LPs in the early 90s.

LPs scratch and warp and although the music quality is arguably better than digital, it's easier and less space consuming to have 1,000 songs on an Ipod

I haven't got a problem with d/l'ing stuff. Most of the bands that are any good can play live. Plus I spent years buying stuff and, like someone else said, finding out it was crap.

Good bands can still earn MORE than a good living so what's the problem.

Quite frankly, if companies want to rip people off for crap instead of charging what it's worth, that's their problem. Music could be sold quite easily for just a few pence instead of this £8-10 an album shit. In any case I doubt any of the top stars are going to go hungry any time soon and the others who haven't made it aren't getting a look-in because of the advertising and bullsh1t from media companies so screw them.

The situation would be much, MUCH healthier if bands sold their stuff online and their sales built up through word of mouth. With income from that and live performances it would be getting back to the way music SHOULD be which is a bloody sight more diverse than it's been for the past few decades.

If the latest Simon Cowell crap gets ripped off, who the hell cares?

i only have 6560 tunes on my hard drive, all of which are either converted from vinyl or ripped from CDs. at one time i had about 2400 LPs and 1200 CDs. what remains, after flogging off most of the vinyl, except what i donated to a thrift shop because i couldn't sell it for what it was theoretically worth, is about 30 LPs that i am trying to sell on eBay. i have 400 CDs left too, and they are going with me to Amoeba Record where i can get ripped off.

stealing is wrong.

Tell that to the music companies and people like Simon Cowell mate

oh, my...someone who doesn't like business practices. how quaint.

Er... yeah... You do realise I've been in business since 1971, do yer?

In fact it's precisely BECAUSE I've been in business that I don't like people gouging others. I wouldn't do it and I don't like it being done to me or other people.

The music industry has been ripping people off for years. They could have taken the opportunity to change their pricing policy to reflect the changes in new technologies so they had a healthy return but no more. That would also have allowed other artists to thrive and given greater diversity as they could compete more easily.

Instead of that it's 'business as usual' with MASSIVE levels of spending on advertising to sell crap to kids too bleeding stupid to know the difference.

I've got absolutely NO sympathy with them AT ALL!!!!

Having said all that I wouldn't nick their stuff because, as you say, 'It would be wrong'...

i wonder whether the current pricing policies take into account the fact that the music industry is under attack from kids who have figured out a fairly fool-proof method of stealing...

I was a little bastard thief growing up. Moms and Pops would give me a $1 a week allowance, 25 cents of which would go into the collection plate on Church Sundays. I had a crappy little am/fm radio one of those stand alone recorders that I would hold together to make recordings. Some fine quality listening that was.

and now, as a fine upstanding grownup, you know the value of crap, er, things...

I don't sell my CD's back either. You can never have too many backups. I learned this after having had 2 500G drives crap out on me.

Other than being in the music 'industry' yer mean?

I buy music because other people buying music used to give me food, shelter, etc. I wasn't a musician, but I road managed a band for a brief stint and how many CDs we sold on a given night at a show often impacted how good the meals we ate the next day would be or whether or not we'd get one hotel room or two (if we couldn't find local couches to crash on of course.)

Legality/illegality aside for the sake of argument, I don't think anybody's crying over whether or not Jessica Simpson ever makes another record. What she does/did is imminently replaceable. Hell, a lot of music is disposable these days and has no staying power. I, for one, want to make damn sure that bands like TV on the Radio, St. Vincent and Animal Collective keep making records though because these are artists people will be talking about in future generations. Or to take it several notches smaller, I want to make sure people like the Black Lips, Quintron or Toro Y Moi keep making records. Sure, a good record can be made at home these days, but professionally recorded records still sound way better for bands with a more nuanced sound. I look at buying a record like casting a vote: I want such and such band to keep making records, here's my contribution towards that happening if they choose to do so.

The free downloading extravaganza has got to partially be responsible for why I get several Kickstarter requests per month from bands. It's still expensive to make a quality sounding record independently and the traditional funding source (people buying them) is drying up. Kickstarter is a more direct route and perhaps where things are really headed in the future (which I'm okay with...talk about voting with your money), but for smaller/independent bands, moving a few units here and there on the road can make a huge difference on a day to day basis.

OK, now THAT is a great reason to pay for music... to pay direct to the bands and, like you say, even more so at live gigs, not least because my nephew is a drummer in a band.

the truth about vinyl is that it requires a lot of care, but scratching and warping is very avoidable. i had about 2000 vinyl LPs. i sold a copy of the original Velvet Underground banana peel LP on eBay for about $200 becuz it was in mint condition and the banana peel sticker was intact...

Ill grooveshark, or band-site, songs I vaguely remember from the hazy night before. If I like them Ill pay the .99 for them. In the old days Id by full albums. No longer.