I once saw "pirates love music, the RIAA does not" in someones signature...it was that or something along those lines. At the beginning I scoffed at it but I keep thinking about it and I am forced to conclude that pirates (which is what we music downloading people are) love music, while the RIAA could care less and want to make a buck. If teh CD is a flop, no prob, just move on to the next big thing to feed the consumer. It sickens me!
I have found COUNTLESS pieces of music that are just invaliable. These pieces of music are not played on boston radios! They are Korean, chinese, japanese, vietnamese, russian, german, french, british,italian songs (and many many more) that get no air time They are songs from genres like house, trance, dance, tecno, happy hardcore, and other styles that the record companies in teh USA dont push for one reason or another.
If it werent for the MP3 format I would NOT be able to sample songs from around teh globe, genres that I love, but from artists that I know nothing about because I live here, in the states, and they live in korea, japan, greece, italy, germany, russia...(and the list goes on).
The RIAA holds us all hostage everytime we go buy a CD. Granted there are CDs that I have bought and I have enjoyed my purchase to the fullest extent (Bl?mchen's "f?r immer und ewig" comes to mind --- no mocking please
) because I liked most if not all teh songs. Other CDs or even worse IMPORTED COMPILATION ALBUMS cost an arm and a leg! I once paid $40 for a stupid imported CD (it was modern talking and I liked about 1/3 of the songs on the CD).
talk about singles ? $6 (or more) for a single -- bah!
The only reason they dont sell CD quality songs (without copyright protection) online is because they cant fetch this much $$$ when they do it online. If people see $3 or $4 per song they will freak!