[Rumori] re: Songwriters Say Piracy Eats Into Their Pay

[matt davignon]

Ok, you're right. It is correct logical structure, but is based on a premise 
that would never be true. If you're going to say "If everyone bought a cd 
instead", why not say "If everyone bought a cd and mailed an extra $5 check 
to Mr. Strouse"?

If you asked any reader of this paragraph how much royalty payments Mr. 
Strouse lost on due to illegal downloading, they would answer $46,000. Since 
very few humans think like Mr. Spock, it's possible to use logical arguments 
to exaggerate or mislead.

On singles, I remember 45's being $1-3. (...and I'm not that old.) When 
cassette singles came out, the prices were often $4 or 5. Last time I looked 
at cd singles, they were $6-8. These days, if you purchased 2 cd singles, 
you might as well have bought the cd.


>Hey-nonny-nonny, matt davignon wrote:
>>>Although songwriters typically earn only pennies for every sale of a 
>>>recorded song, if every person who downloaded "Hard Knock Life" had 
>>>bought a CD instead, Mr. Strouse would have collected at least $46,000 in 
>>>royalty payments, assuming he would have received 4 cents a download.
>>This is flawed reasoning, assuming that all (or even a large amount) of 
>>downloaders would shell out $20 for a full length cd if they just wanted 
>>the song.

Then Taylor McLaren <morakanabad at yahoo.ca> gone and said:
>How is it flawed reasoning? "If every person who downloaded... had bought a 
>CD instead, he would have received..." sounds like a perfectly sound 
>conditional statement to me. Obviously, one can't assume that everybody who 
>downloaded it *would* have bought the CD, but that's not what the article 
>said.

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