Listen, About all of this RIAA and piracy talk. I do not condone the actions of the RIAA and them hacking in our computers. However, I don't like the idea of music piracy either. The situation is far worse than most people give it credit for.
Recent news reports have shown that the recording industry is taking a major hit from it (I'm not sure of the percentage but I think it's 60%). Think in these terms: If every year your business lost 60% of the money it was supposed to have, within a few years your company would be bankrupt. That means fewer recording labels. That means fewer bands. Also, since there is no money in it anymore, we would see fewer and fewer music videos (although MTV only plays 1 hour of videos anyways), because they want to make money off of there music and they can't do so anymore by those means. You'll have to pay $20 to see them in concert instead.
Do you think that itunes and Rhapsody are a good choice for getting music? think again. If the only music that gets made is only put on the web, we wont get all the extras that we do now. No more hidden tracks. We would only get songs that they were absolutely sure would sell and the others won't be worth making. Take Evanesance for example: 2 song made it big, but the entire album is wonderful. However, if we had to go online in order to buy it we would only get those 2 songs and the others would never have been made. Do you see how this will destroy the variety that we have now?
Don't blame the recording industry for this either. The high cd prices are because of the record stores. If the cd costs you $15, the cd only cost the store $7. Even though I am one fish swimming against the tidal wave of piracy I hope that I may have chaged some pirates views on what they are causing. I myself am a digital audio and video production student so I know exactly what this is doing to my industries.
Please help put an end to all of this.