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

[illegal art]

>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.
>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.


it doesn't explicitly say that, but what it implies is just as 
important.  most people are smart enough to get what is implied, but 
unfortunately also dumb enough to accept the implications as truth. 
just look at the methods of tv advertising.

to calculate those downloads as missed cd sales is just silly.  it's 
as ludicrous as calculating how much the music industry would make if 
everyone who listened to "free" radio bought the cds instead.

how do they even know that people who download stuff listen to it? 
and of the people who listen to it, how many actually listen to more 
than half of the track before moving onto another downloaded file? 
and of the people who listen to an entire download, what percentage 
actually decide they like the file and keep it indefinitely as though 
they own it?  this is just crappy journalism (aka propaganda from 
corporate interests).  let's see some real research and stats!

philo