What should be paid for (with respect to music)?

That was an interesting read. Thanks for the link.

I remember reading it some months back. I say companies must think hard and find ways to give people something extra for their money, other than plain mp3's that they can already get the same (quality-wise) from pirated sources.

As a frequent purchaser of CD's and Vinyls, i really have troubles understanding why their prices are equal (or even higher at cases) to those 15 years back. Like the economy worldwide now (at least in the western world) is as good as 15 years back. I think their price is still too damn high (as the rent party would say). The only thing sometimes cheap are the digital downloads which as i said before, do not offer something more to the buying public than what the cloned pirated copies do, sadly.

Can you download spotify content as lossless Audio once you pay for it ?

Well why pay for something that plays, streams, goes off in the air and then it's gone forever? Or it doesn't work like that? (no idea, spotify doesn't support third world countries yet).

Movies are different. Rarely do I, at least, and many more people i'd suggest, want to view the same movie or tv episode over and over again. One is enough.

But with music is different. Why do i have to pay for a one-time radio for my favorite music? I want to OWN my favorite music and re-visit it frequently. Such a paid streaming music service would be useless for me at least. Unless i pirated it (here we go again) and recorded the stream in lossless quality. So you see where it all fails again.

Exactly. You pay for the ACCESS, not the physical ownership.

Can you download those flacs you pay for?

Useless for me then.

So, can you listen to your own tracks (located locally on your PC) through Spotify? Or does Spotify have a note of your library and then streams the tracks for you?

I'd disagree with that, but perhaps I'm not in my right mind. I judge right and wrong depending on whether the action causes any harm. If a person would not be buying an album anyway, I see absolutely nothing wrong with him copying it, as there would be no loss to the creator. That said, reality is often more muddy than that, as people can rationalize their behaviours, and convince themselves that everything they've downloaded, they wouldn't have purchased anyway, even if they actually would have bought much of the music. So the act is on somewhat shaky ground ethically, but posed as an ideal example, I don't find it wrong. I agree with the rest of your post though.

Anyway, onto the article:

It's true that many downloaders tend to oversimplify the issue, but the writer of this article doesn't do any better. The music industry and artists are indeed earning less overall than they used to; without a single justification he concludes: "There is no other explanation except for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists". Correlation doesn't imply causation, alas this writer doesn't seem to have realized this simply fact. And immediately after he goes on to imply that his neighbor committed suicide because of it. The leaps in logic and the emotional appeal seems a bit much to me.

What about the fact than in the last 10-15 years, the period where internet downloading has increased, the music industry has been met with increasing competition from DVDs and video games? Both of these industries have boomed, all fighting for the money from the same group (young people). Strangely, this guy, and many like him, ignore this essential factor completely.

Another factor they continually ignore, is the fact that downloading (whether legal or illegal) will inevitably have huge promotional effects. I think the vast majority of the buzz sorrounding film music to take an example is due to illegal downloading, and I think boards like this, Filmtracks and FSM would be rather more quiet without it, due to the fact that many more people are exposed to music that they otherwise wouldn't, and they end up ranting about it online, sometimes causing others to buy it. Also, worth pointing out is that research shows that the people who download illegally, also tend to be the same group who buys the most music. It doesn't really seem to line up with the simplistic claims we hear from the people who rant against downloading.

Whether internet downloading overall hurts or helps sales, seems to me to not be a question easy to resolve. Research seems to be pointing in different directions. Perhaps there isn't even a simple answer; perhaps illegal downloading can help sales under some circumstances, and harm them under others.

Peter

It's like you're using someone else's really big music library (with your playlists). And for most people, it's costless, with some ads. You use it for listening, not for ownership. Listen to hundreds of albums hundreds of times and decide what you want to own yourself. I'm not sure what the problem is.

You can stream unlimited, yes. And you don't pay for that, but every 5 or 6 tracks, there'll be a 30 second ad. But yes, you do require an internet connection, except in the premium offline mode. It's not a replacement for a music collection, but it is a legitimate way to get across an awful lot of material without having to pay for it. I often forget whether I'm listening to one of my itunes playlists, or one of my spotify playlists. (I paid for the medium version, which cuts the ads.)

Whenever i go online to buy score cd's it never falls largely below the 20-euros mark. In stores it's the same. I wonder how it is in the rest of the E.U