Free Music Downloading
Should free- music downloading be banned? I believed that allowing free access to unlimited songs could eventually undermine the music industry; however, nobody wants to pay outrageous amounts just for a few good songs on a bad CD. When I looked up information regarding these stats, results shocked me. The people who never download files or pirate CD's (about 54% of the population) make up only 39% of music sales. The majority of sales belong to the infrequent downloaders (46%); accounting for roughly 61% of sales. The last 22% of those surveyed buy approximately 36% of CD's, the highest percentage within a given group. In other words: all those attempts by the recording industry to stop music downloads is in fact the cause of declining sales. The recording industry is shooting itself in the foot by eliminating file sharing programs.
The rise of Napster and the peer to peer (p2p) file sharing programs enable people all over the world to share music for free.
English: Rally in Stockholm, Sweden, in support of...
English: Music industry: Pie chart of music format...
Kaleidoscope theme utility using Albie Wong’s El...In my opinion, shutting down the file sharing networks is the stupidest thing they could do. Furthermore, with all this hype about suing Napster and other such program manufacturers, the RIAA is denying the public from receiving factual information. I agree to the general downloading of music by the public, since far from destroying the industry, they in fact increase sales. I don't believe downloading a couple of mp3's falls into the category of theft or piracy. Stupid as it may seem, the record companies do. They reason that if you download even one song, you're classified the same as if you downloaded hundreds of songs.
I don't like it when I see advertisements for bootlegs and pirated movies and such. However, it is hard for me to not feel sympathetic to...
Music
Yours is a good essay on whether music downloading should be banned. Your presentation is well expressed and thought out. This can certainly be a controversial topic and hopefully some middle ground can be arrived at which will be fair to the music industry and to those who wish to download music. A bibliography would have been a welcome addition when statistics and quotations are used. Nice work!
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