I recently read a
Punknews.org article about Muse's frontman Matt Bellamy's idea to wage a progressive usage tax on bandwidth. He claims that this would help solve the downloading "problem" and promote the expansion of "creative industries". I was in like what?... 5th or 6th grade when Napster hit the scene... and illegally downloading copyrighted material has only become easier as more programs, websites, etc. are making it more accessible. But what this has done for the music industry is what I'm really curious to know.
Before iTunes, mainstream music sales were at an all time low. People saw no reason to go to Tower Records and pay $18.99 for the new Britney Spears album... and can you REALLY blame them? Now though, people are willing to pay $9.99 for a bad CD online and it's the smaller, underground bands that are being slighted. It's crazy how many talented musicians there are today, and how many talented bands those musicians are creating. New genres are constantly evolving at a ridiculous pace... and it's seriously impossible to keep up with everything. But what's the problem? I'm not going to public and say that I support illegally downloading music, or that I think there should be laws created against it, but I will say that Muse's Bellamy is being a bit ridiculous with his suggestions. There aren't even taxes on online sales, why would we write law to attempt to regulate bandwidth usage?
What I'm basically trying to say is what an old episode of South Park already said. Wealthy pop musicians are talented and work extremely hard, but they don't even write their own music most of the time and are making more money than my favorite 100 bands combined, if not more. And I personally feel like if we limit the ways in which music is available to the public, we're going to be stuck listening to Nickelback... Most of my favorite bands make next to nothing on their record sales anyways and are near completely dependent upon touring and merch sales, instead. I read an article in AP a few months back about how Bring Me The Horizon signed a less than fair contract with their label... and they're all pretty much broke. But they play music because it's what they love to do... and that's what makes it better than the shit they play on the radio. Because those artists are just trying to get paid.
Honestly, I don't know if there is any way to know if illegal downloading is helping or hurting the music industry... it's extremely difficult to even wrap your mind around the economics of it all considering the shear amount of music that we're lucky enough to be surrounded by. But I do think this is a really important issue that needs to be discussed and some conclusions do need to be reached. What do you think?
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