State of Filesharing (Rant)

As things continue to progress it looks like the alphabet soup of copyright cops have a few short lived victories. The first is with Jammie Thomas. If you dont know she is , she is the single mother that has been charged and found guilty of sharing 24 songs or so using kazaa. She decided to fight and somehow the RIAA told enough lies during the trial to push over a million dollar fine on her. How that came about i will never know, but my guess is fear.
People sometimes are naive about filesharing like they would never do it, but in reality most of those people are just as guilty as the people who actually download the music. You might be saying how is that so…..Well i will tell you. The same people who judge others are the ones who dont get their hands dirty because they get a friend, co worker, cousin, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, or even some guy in a supermarket to burn a cd or dvd for them because we all know that going to the movies and spending 5.00 on a 32 oz , 4.00 on a hot dog, 3.50 on a box of candy, and buying a 7.00 ticket is not considered fun. Or how about a cd that cost 13.99 in the store…..Really? Most people dont even like the full CD that they buy from the store. This is where i applaud people like Apple and Amazon for giving us a choice on what we really want from a CD. With hard economic time and pockets getting tighter i suspect piracy to be on the rise. Is it right? Thats not for me to say, but if an artist wants to come to my town and have a concert I would be more and happy to pay for a ticket to go out and support him/her. The key to getting people to pay for music is (drum roll please)…………..MAKE GOOD MUSIC!!!!!!!!!! Of course everyone isnt going to like what an artist puts out, but if you believe in what you do, you will achieve a loyal following who will buy your CDs, and attend your concerts.
I set out to discuss the state of filesharing and yet i find myself giving advice to artist around the world. This is not really the directions i was headed for, but as a consumer these are things people need to hear in the entertainment industry. And truthfully its not the artist fault. The RIAA, IFPI, BREIN, and all the others are paid by the record companies themselves. Artist have come out against the action of attacking their fans because they dont want to lose them. The record companies are only worried about re couping their advances and promotional cost and dont care what fan they trample on to do it. In this day and age an artist can do just fine by themselves because the means of distribution have changed. In the past an artist needed a big label to do their distribution, but now with the progression of technology you can reach worldwide in seconds.
Where is all this going? Well filesharing forces creativity to a new level. People who say that filesharing hinders and artist aren’t really looking close enough. You have directors and producers giving away their materials for free on torrent networks. You have artist that give away their music free on their sites. It all goes to show that once you establish yourself, the fans will flock from far and wide.
RIP Micheal Jackson, Billy Mayes, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahan, and anyone else i didnt mention.










P2P swaps: where’s the action?