Downloading Vs. Buying used
 

Sony announced last week (or so) that they were going to start charging a fee to access online content of their games if the game was purchased second-hand.
This little bit of info prompted a lengthy conversation in my house about the legality of buying used albums (where the artist and label recieve no money) vs. downloading an album from a torrent site etc. (again, no money)

My question, then, or at least idea for the thread, is not necessarily why one is legal and one isn't, but why one has become such a normal part of society (pawn shops, amazon, ebay, used record stores) and one is still the source of many unnecessary lawsuits against largely young people who just want to hear a good song.

a physical CD has but one owner at a time. once it is purchased, it may be re-sold a few times before it dies, but most CDs on the planet have only had a few owners. so if you single out 10,000 people who have owned a particular album, you've got at least 7,000 original purchases, and probably more than that.

digital is completely different. a single CD can be purchased, then disseminated to 10,000 people who don't pay a dime for their copy.

see the difference?

Simply put: Because one is a physical product and one is not. When buying/selling a used CD, there is no assumption about whether or not the previous owner is still using the music or not. So all it is is a product that anyone in possession of it can choose to sell.

I buy most of my CDs used and yes I feel bad that the artist isn't getting paid, but at least I'm buying something that someone else somewhere paid for and at some point the artist was supported. Not an mp3 that maybe came from a CD 10,000 people back. Or came from a demo leak that no one bought. But really it's more about me wanting the physical copy and not just the mp3s.

If it was up to the music industry they'd make selling second hand albums illegal.

And don't think they've not tried to in the past.

OH yeah, I know. I've worked in record stores the majority of my teenage and adult life. I remeber a time when they were tyring to get us to PAY to play an artists music in the store!

They tend to view albums as intellectual property rather than commodities, which is somewhat baffling considering how commodified the music industry has become. Have you seen disclaimers they throw on the back of CDs?

I purchase almost all my music from independent record stores so I don't feel too bad when half of them are secondhand when the money is still going to support independent retailers.

Truth.

And yeah it's insane how they've tried to make used CD sales illegal, and trying to charge stores for playing music in stores. LOL. You want to promote our music? That'll cost ya! Hahaha.

As shocking as that should be out of sheer cheek I have to say that doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

I think the legality of the issue is why one's "a normal part of society" and the other is the source of "unnecessary lawsuits." On one side you have ownership of a tangible product, the CD, and ownership is passed to another person with the help of eBay, Amazon etc. The other side deals with the reproduction and dissemination of something which is govern by copryright laws. The latter, "downloading an album from a torrent site etc. (again, no money)," is seen by both the artist and the industry as an infridgement of copyright laws. It is a strange arguement because when you buy a CD you can do anything you want with it, leave it factory sealed and not play it, or play it a thousand times, it doesn't matter to the RIAA; and one is allowed to make a copy of it, or lend it to a friend. P2P is very close to making a copy of it and lending to it as a friend at the same time. But take a few million people with a few thousand albums and you have a few billion albums reproduced by ordinary people using thier computers in lieu of the recording industry doing it. I don't know the actual figures or the amount of money lost, but by their standpoint it is a big problem. I heard 10,000 songs is the limit, I not sure if whether if that is the limit to downloaded songs paid for, not paid for or both. I have to look that up.

No, you're not. That's the point.

Surely you need some kind of licence to do that anyway, we have the PRS in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRS_for_Music

But you would think that in their opinion, ebay and pawn shops would be "worse" because someone is still making a profit, and the band/management/label aren't seeing any of it. Whereas with a torrent, no one is making a profit.

Which point I made two that you highlighted, making a copy of it for personal use, which I did heard you could do. Or was it lending a CD to a friend, which I never heard a person could not do.


Pawn Shops
Say you buy a CD for $15, you don't want it, so you sell it to the Pawn Shop they give $5 and turn around and sell it for $10. You lost $10, the Pawn shop made a $5 profit and the person saved $5, out of the $10 there's $5 that reimburses you for the original purchase, so in an indirect way that $5 goes to the buyer to the pawn shop to you to the store to the company that issued the CD - if you follow the money trail. With eBay and companies that sell through Amazon make even bigger profits then some pawn shops. Amazon is weird because they might sell a CD from say LoveShackCDs for $100 where you can get the same CD as Bob'sBookStore for $3 - plus shipping and handleling & maybe even tax. If you bought from Amazon you would understand.

Torrents
But with the torrents you can't say no one stands to make a profit, I think Apple is making a profit selling iPods.

To be honest I'd never considered that when I buy a 2nd hand LP/CD I'm not giving any royalties to the artist so this is an interesting point. Like an earlier poster said though you're often helping keep a 2nd hand record store in business, which in itself is great for music and therefore artists.

The whole "downloading damages the record industry" thing is a nonsense anyway. I've read enough reports now that back up my own instinct, namely that music lovers generally still spend the same as they did pre-torrents but continue to consume beyond that amount for free. This extra consumption thus fuels the "habit" and those acts become part of future spending, whether that be the next LP, a gig, T-shirt, whatever. The only people who now purely leech off torrents are those who spent next to bugger all in the first place anyway. Slightly off-topic there, admittedly.

I like buying cd's because I like the art and stuff but to tell you the truth I look at it for about a week put the cd on itunes and the cd goes back on the self. MP3 are great but if you meet a stranger you can give them a website to go to or a cd. If I had to choose I say a CD. I DJ to and I love digging thru old records and to tell you the truth I get the same feeling when I find a record store with used Cd's. Unless you can see every time a song gets played piracy and resale of used cd's are always going to be an issue. I'll always buy Cd's and buy legal downloads. I'm going to do my part to keep the music industry healthy

That's exactly right. When companies say they lost X number of dollars from downloads, that's based on the assumption that every single person who downloaded it would have bought it anyway.

That's obviously not the case. I use torrents merely as a preview. If I like the album, I'll buy it. If not, then too bad, but I delete the music.

And if you look at the number of people who are in college/young kids etc who simply don't have the money, then the record companies can't possibly count that as "lost income" because these people don't have the money to buy albums in the first place.

Well, I guess internet and mp3 culture isn't only bad thing for artists...
I can say about me that with internet I found many many artists. Probably without internet (and downloading or uploading) I wouldn't find them because they aren't in Tv, radio or magazines.
Internet makes you more free - you can find and listen to everything what you want - it can be music from your country, Africa, Iceland - whatever.
Youtube is also good thing - it showed me some artists and it help me with my decision if I want to listen to (or buy) some music or not.
I know, downloading and Youtube stuff is illegal... but... I guess thanks to these things lot of bands find some new fans.

It depends on people...
Always there are people who steal music or who don't buy music. But it was possible before internet too - I think lot of people share/shared music between friends and for example only 20 % of children bought it. At least czech teenagers before internet era was like this. One kid bought album and 20 others kids had it from this person.
People who trully love music probably still buy CDs. It's just different and for me better feeling to listen to music from CD, to have it with nice cover in my hands.
Of course everybody is downloading sometimes but without downloading I wouldn't find what I love now. And I support my favourite musicians so I buy albums... But some of them I wouldn't know without internet and downloading ;)

Just to play devil's advocate, we broke college kids back in the day did find ways to buy music back in the day. We just didn't consume it to the extent that kids today do. Sure, some would steal CDs from the shops, many would borrow or get copies from friends, but I think it's fair to say that everyone spent some amount of money on CDs/vinyl/tapes back in the day. Today, there are kids that spend absolutely zero dollars on music because they were brought up on MP3s. Sad but true.

In general though, I do believe that being able to preview music does help some bands get the exposure they deserve, and helps weed out some of the garbage (hopefully contributing to the death of some top-40 garbage artists that big labels love to push), and that real music fans will still spend money on music despite their ability to get it for free.

Here's a novel idea for record companies if they want to make money.

Stop releasing so many crappy albums.

You know what I would be interested in seeing statistics for?

Loss of revenue from illiegal downloading vs Loss of revenue from people downloading one or two songs legally from I-Tunes rather than a full album.

A lot of artists are pulling their music off of iTunes; it boosts their album sales:

More Artists Steer Clear of iTunes - WSJ.com

:laughing:

Oh no...... It's a 'part of the death knell of the music business' that people can choose the songs they want to buy?

What a load of horse shit. Like I said, put out an album worth buying and people will but it. Not a collection of songs with one or two good ones and a bunch of filler to make up the rest.

The music industry has always been a seller's market. I can remember for years being overcharged for CDs. Seeing singles released in loads of different formats all with different tracks so you had to spend about the price of a whole album just to get 3 or 4 new songs you didn't have on B sides.

Now it's not, now it's a buyers market. So either adapt to it or fuck off

I concur with that. I'm slightly different to you in that I do download stuff to burn to CD - just a modern version of the old blank cassette LP taped off a mate. Of course the beauty now is that I'm not limited to what mates own but can blag the stuff off people I don't even now. However, as a record collector (if you like) that would never be my sole (or even main) source of music. So I use it to fill in gaps in my collection. These are LPs that would only make it onto "the list" of stuff I might pick up later when/if I get around to them. In the event that I did and bought them, then they take the place of other stuff I would have bought instead.

But the whole thing of this extra consumption is it fires my love of music and keeps me in the game. Prior to torrents I had a few spells where I stopped buying music pretty much entirely. Since them my buying has stayed at a really high level. I would suggest that I'm fairly typical.

Actually I'm not a "record collector" as such, the point is that a whole shelf full of blank CD cases looks ugly, no-one wants that. Whereas a few scattered about the place look fine and it's a sensible way to fill gaps in back catalogues on a modest income.