Originally Posted by crockett

You are taking that line way out of context. I'm not talking about torrent sites and people who steal. I'm talking about the fact that the marketplace has changed.

People are starting to want MP3's instead of CD's now days. So the best place to deliver the customer what they want is on the web. Doesn't mean they have to condone stealing but they need to cater to their customer base or they will lose it.

This is where the RIAA has failed, they failed to accept the fact that the marketplace has changed and they did too little far too late. Now they are trying to play catch up. If they had embraced the web and it's power to deliver their product, they would have made billions of dollars. Now they are lucky if the product isn't given away from free.

Simple thing happened, a new thing came out a while back called MP3's, people like them. The Music industry didn't like them, because they were stuck up on selling CD's for $20 a pop like the greedy bastards they are.

So the customer base still wanted MP3's so they went and D/Led them for free. The customer base got used to D/Led them for free because the Music industry failed to adapt and deliver the product in the format the customer base wanted.

So now we have the RIAA trying to play catch up and trying to shove the rabbit back in the hat, which is a very hard thing to do. If the record companies would have offered their product on the net from the start and reasonable prices they could have made major bank.

I have no idea about their numbers, and what it takes to make a profit for them, but I'd think they could have offered songs at .25 cents a download and still made a profit. If people had been given a legal way to get their music from the start, stealing it wouldn't have been stopped but it likely wouldn't have been as big as it is today.

Add to that you have sites like pirate bay making over 80k a month in advertising.. You don't think the music industry couldn't have made just a little bit in advertising on their own sites if they were likely to be some of the biggest sites on the net? They could have made a bank but they were too stupid and greedy to see the forest because of the trees.