i think its perfectly fine as long as the artist gets paid.
gear cost money you know and we spend alot of time and afford writing and producing the music it will just be unfair for us to be giving it away for free.

Yeah, this is exactly right. Check this out:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

Dont forget kiddies...

It's illegal!

But, I do occassionally hear a band on radio, think, "Hey, they sound cool", see what else they got to offer by DL another track, and then if I like them, I go out and buy the album.

I quite like actually owning a CD. It is something physical, that I can touch, and look at. Not a pile of numbers floating in digital wilderness. Not to mention MP3 quality is FUCKING SHIT!!!!!!! I have a hard time listening to that jumbled mess of "audio".

Give me 24/96 any day. Hell, give me 16/44.1 Its a whole lot better than the shit floating out there in P2P land.

Whatever.

:o

thats why so many producers and artists are settings up a dummy label and sell their stuff directly online in forms of wma and mp3.
the only bad point is that its hard to advertise yourself and set up gigs this way.
(usualy the record label take care of thos both).

Quality is probably the best reason (if any reason) to buy from major labels these days. Unfortunately money is the driving force with big companies (not only music companies), and articles like the one linked above shows how horrible it can be for the artist.

How about your experience Panopticon? I think I read somewhere on here you are making a fair bit of cash from music. What sort of deal do you have?

The RIAA vs The People

http://www.futureofmusicbook.com/

This would lead to a point in which the musician should be more an accountant than a musician. You can't even imagine the amount of paper war and work the financial things of that level require. Plus an individual musician probably can't get the crew as cheap as a major label does which leads to a point that the you don't get any more profits plus you'll have to focus on accounting instead of music. This is of course an extreme situation but very possible. World is not blad & white you know.

And they do get much less. What is the point in this? Every musician should get as much money as The Beatles?

So you want a world in which no-one thinks mostly one's own interest? A noble vision, it's like dreaming of a working socialist equal world. If the suit men don't fuck all then someone else does.

Yes they do and they are digging their own grave. I'll just sit and wait. But by boicoting all major label releases you also boicot the musicians and the other people working on the releases. Taking a bread from a poor musician just because you don't like the management taking a share.

There are funny phenomenas in the major label grave digging business. Good example is that excessive copy protection madness which starts to harm the consumers thus harming the business and the musicians. Yay for capitalism.

In Finland a group of members of the Parliment gave a christmas present for the Minister of Culture: A copyprotected CD and a mp3 player with a card that urges to immident actions to get the contents of the CD in the mp3 player until the New Year which means ramming the new copyright law through next week.

lol this kind of funny stuff can only happen in finland. :D

This is possible without the behemoth which is the major label recording industry at the moment. The paperwork is huge because the recording business has made it that way, plenty of small businesses exist without having to be part of some massive conglomorate, why can't the music industry work similarly?

The original point was that the Beatles made a fortune from only getting a few p per record sold, so if artists got a higher percentage of the actual sales they could make a living without having to sell massive quatities. It is only that the majotrs rip off artists so badly at the moment that it means that artists have to sell huge numbers of albums to make a living. Did you read that link to Steve Albini looking at the numbers and who makes what?

My point is that the middlemen are taking a far bigger slice of the pie than they deserve, not that they shouldn't exist at all.

I agree that they are digging their own grave, and I'm not condoning downloading music and not buying it, though I will refuse to buy music from major labels. At the same time I don't really listen to music from major labels as most of it is not to my tastes.

I'm pretty sure we are thinking the same thing here :)