Downloading music has changed the landscape of the music and film industry. The RIAA and various production and recording companies claim that billions in revenue have been lost. Partly this is due to the lower CD sales. They refuse to believe that maybe their products isn’t as popular as they hope. They insist that the blame is on the illegal downloaders. They may be partly right.
The beauty of downloading is that an artist’s music will never truly disappear. The artist may not achieve the level of fame they desire (they only have 3 houses, 6 cars, a yacht and some “bling-bling”) but thanks to the internet, their music will be available for a very long time long after they have stopped performing. Isn’t that the true dream of most artists – to become part of history; maybe become a legend?
The music and film industry don’t get it yet. People are wise enough to know that you only buy the products you want to collect, the items that are truly valuable. That means that people will always buy the CD’s and DVD’s as long as the music is great and the films are worth watching. They will willingly pay to download a film or track or album legally in order to have a great copy of it. What the industry giants need to do is make the costs reasonable so that there is no point in pirating anymore.
At least Apple got it off to a good start when they made tracks downloadable at $0.99. Now if only Microsoft and any other players who will come in will just help to make the price even more reasonable, we just might be done with piracy altogether.