A Billboard style music chart showing how many times a song or album has been illegally downloaded from the various pirate sites around the world.
I have a friend that did a calculation of how many times a music project of his was downloaded by going to the various illegal download sites and counting the downloads. It was well over a million. His legitimate sales were a well under that. This is the plight of the 21st century recording artist.
So since illegal downloading of music is here to stay for the foreseeable future, might as well give the artist some credit by showing who was the most pirated that week.
The birth of the "Pirate Gold Album" perhaps?-- doctorremulac3, Jul 14 2012 Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent http://torrentfreak...-bittorrent-120702/ [tatterdemalion, Jul 14 2012] Top of the pirate charts: http://www.televisi...aptain_Pugwash.html [MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 14 2012] Several recently successful artists were brought to attention not because of their sales but because of their views on myspace/youtube.-- mitxela, Jul 14 2012 Something similar is done for films (link).-- tatterdemalion, Jul 14 2012 By the way, this isn't a pro-intellectual property piracy idea. As somebody who receives regular music royalty checks, nobody is more anti piracy than me. However, if my stuff is getting stolen and listened to anyway, might be nice to see where it ranks on what people are stealing.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 14 2012 Illegal downloading is so 2002. Youtube has every song in HD and I can run it in the background on my smartphone.-- DIYMatt, Jul 14 2012 Next, just humming a tune you like in the street will have the FBI reaching for their pad of blank extradition warrants.
O-kay ....
Before the invention of audio recording, musicians would play in a venue and the audience (or venue owner) would pay them. If they didn't, the musician would either starve to death, or find another job. Either way, no more music.
Then, audio recording was invented. Musicians could perform once, and then wait for the royalties to roll in (but some listeners were still happy to pay for a live performance). Since duplicating recordings was technically difficult, most people were happy with this situation.
Then came the compact cassette, the CD rewriter, the MP3 player and the WorldWideInterWebNetThingy. Alas ! Listeners started to give music to one another for free, because they could. Fie, egad !
But;
Some listeners will still pay for a "live" performance.
Most people who download music wouldn't pay for it anyway.
Most musicians want their work to be heard.
Home taping is killing the music industry ...
Oooh, look ... "industry". Not "art" ... instead, something produced in large quantities to make money.
Cui Bono ?-- 8th of 7, Jul 14 2012 8's referring to the history of hysteria regarding pirated music. I'll add that it was also thought by some that recorded music would destroy the music business that was at the time, primarily based on the sale of sheet music. Then somebody figured out that you get money selling records. I believe some thought that radio would also be the death of music which was about as wrong as you can get.
Home taping wasn't the problem people thought it might be because it was still a lot of work to make a tape copy of a record just to end up with something with no artwork, liner notes or lyrics.
Downloads didn't require any work so they caught on like nothing before. They've had some negative impact on record sales but they also have a pretty big upside. Music is much easier to ship by clicking a mouse than by warming up a record pressing machine, putting the disk in a cardboard sleeve, packing it in a box and putting it on a truck so it can sit on shelves in record stores manned by hippies. And though a single still costs 99 cents, the same as it did in the 70s when I started buying music, there's no overhead. It all goes to the artist and Apple. So how come the music industry is 1/20th of what it was in it's heyday in the 50s through the 90s?
It might have something to do with how utterly craptacular modern music is. Art-forms do die when the artists and industry get too cocky about selling crap rather than going through the hassle of creating a quality product. Andy Warhol with his 3rd grader's rendition of a soup can and Jackson Pollock's selling the drop cloths from his paint studio helped to kill painting as a popular art form. All you need is enough people who are too scared to say "That sucks." and enough idiots who pretend they like it so they can be part of the in crowd to get rolling on the express train to Crapville, but that's the last stop baby.
Ask any smart kid what they think of the music the industry is trying to sell them these days. Sell, crap, get crappy sales. Pretty simple formula.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 15 2012 So since you've never written a song that anybody would want to buy you don't see why others should be able to charge for their creative efforts? Do you have little respect for authors who want to get paid for their writing? I don't know of any farmers who went broke just because they got a couple of truckloads of corn stolen. Who do those arrogant farmers think they are?
Pandora and Slacker pays the artist and YouTube is in the process. They also provide links to buy the songs so allowances have been made for the sale of the music. It's not stealing because the artist gets paid.
I know you're just wanting to say something nasty under the guise of weighing in on some perceived controversy but the "controversy" about whether or not people should be able to charge for the intellectual property they've created was closed a long time ago.
Not that that has anything to do with anything. The idea was to give artists who have their stuff downloaded without monetary compensation some credit.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 15 2012 So people download music without paying for it because otherwise their family will starve? "Sorry kids, we're eating dumpster burgers again tonight because daddy bought the new Ted Nugent album with the welfare check."
Wow, I didn't know that.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 15 2012 How'd they pay for the computer, monthly internet bill and iPod?-- doctorremulac3, Jul 15 2012 Sounds like they need to spend less time listening to Ted Nugent and more time looking for a job.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 15 2012 Sure, pay for it like everybody else. It's 99 cents.
You wouldn't suggest they get their morning sixpack of malt liquor for free, why should they get free music?
Anyway, gotta go. Busy today.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 15 2012 random, halfbakery