Music industry blames piracy on newsgroups & search engines

I guess their excessive greed had nothing to do with it?

The reason nobody buys music is because it sucks. New music sucks. OK maybe I'm getting old. The sound quality of CDs put out now is horrific. There is very little loss when converted to a compressed format because the sound is crap to start with. I cannot stand the sound of new or "remastered" CDs. There is so much compression used, the sound hurts my ears! No wonder vinyl still lives. And no, I do not believe vinyl sounds better than CD. A properly recorded / mastered CD sounds terrific. For example, listen to a CD that was reissued by Mobil Fidelity. All of the original dynamics will be there. Listen to a recent release. They all sound the same. You just hear loud! What's next CDs recorded with square waves?

I agree modern mixing is awful. CD's mixed in the early/mid 90's or earlier sound so much better then what comes out now.

Compile that would corporate rock and corporate hip hop.. there's little interest in modern music. I probably bought 300 cd's in the 90's.. maybe 20 since the year 2000.

As for usenet.. its that part of the internet alot of people understand. I guess politicians will either blindly regulate against it, or not bother because they don't understand it.

Problem with usenet is that it really doesn't require much uploading. You can encrypt the traffic via SSL and its hard for anyone to see what your downloading...

I agree also with the awful mastering that goes into modern music. While it is useful for FM radio to ensure the music is clearly heard over the background hiss, it serves no real purpose on CDs. Every CD player has a volume control, so it should be up to the user to turn up the volume. Let's not forget that making the music sound louder will only cause some to actually turn down the volume!

For the piracy issue, in my opinion the music industry is killing themselves by not taking the right approach! New laws, suspending user accounts and trying to monitor/stop file sharing based piracy is certainly going to keep making users find new ways of exchanging music. As they can't beat it, a solution would be to try competing with it!

At the moment, they have already got one thing right and this by allowing music providers to sell individual tracks without DRM. However, like "unlimited download" Internet services, they really need to do the same here also, where for a fixed monthly price, users can download as many tracks as they want also without DRM.

If music industry allowed unlimited DRM-free downloads for a flat price, users will be faced with a few choices:

1. Get the music "free" from P2P and face the current risks of infected files, improperly tagged/named songs or badly encoded music, not to mention the legal risks.
2. Pay a fee for a usenet service to greatly reduce the risk of downloading music, avail of faster downloads and put up with the other other issues (e.g. badly encoded) issues of P2P.
3. Pay a lower price from illegally operated online music shops and risk credit card fraud or the shop being brought down and losing the credit they purchased.
4. Pay a monthly fee for unlimited music that is guaranteed to be properly encoded, free of viruses and which they know has been legitimately obtained, eliminating the legal risk altogether.
5. Some other (il)legal way of obtaining music.

Of course the music industry just make it awkward on themselves and everyone else by looking at changing laws, suspending user accounts and issuing lawsuits, only to endlessly complain about piracy and repeat this process...

first of all:

1. record companies cut down their "overhead" costs by buying all these softwares instead of having live instruments. resulting in compressed audio which they claim is just as good as playing the instrument live, which is bullshit.

2. quality of recordings are horrible compared to what they were in the 80's - 90's.

3. music: ahhhmmm, garbage? today its all about sex, money and competing with the next artist...

the music industry needs a reset button, badly.

+1 to all of the above commentary in general. I expressed similar sentiments in a comment that was reposted as a separate article here:
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/21528

It amazes and saddens me that they STILL don't get it :
"people who pirate music actually purchase more than those who don’t"

Well, duh.

Those are the people with the passion to go looking for it in the first place. My mom doesn't download or share music at all. Because she doesn't listen to music at all. Via itunes or the radio or the mp3 player she was given as a gift and has never used. I, on the other hand, will be a cranky person indeed if I should forget to bring the detachable face of my car stereo with me on even a 10 minute drive. And I would sooner spend 20 bucks on Sting's next album to rip to the mp3 player on my cell phone rather than on the pre-paid minutes to make it useable as a phone if I had to choose between the two. And yet, though I did buy a download of a non-commercial piece, I have not been moved to to purchase a single cd for a number of years now.

I downloaded quite a bit of music back in the days of Morpheus and Audiogalaxy after the demise of Napster, but even then the titles were mostly restricted to those I already owned in vinyl or cassette form anyway, and tihs was an easy way to migrate them to cd without having to buy my extensive collection all over again in a new medium. From about 1884 until the turn of the millennium the majority of my discretionary income was spent on music, but there was less and less that I even wanted to listen to on the radio, much less purchase on overpriced cd by the time downloading became fashionable enough to catch the attention of the RIAAsses. And this from someone who actually spent money on n'sync's "Pop", and some Disney bubble-gum girl group called 'b*witched" (and yes, I bought Brittany Spears first album too)!

My digital collection, largely garnered online, is at least 100gb large, and more than 99% comprised of music that was released prior to 2002. I'd wager though that they would have seen declining profit anyway because of the music (ie "content") they have been "providing" (ie attempting to shove down our throats because corporations see us as "consumers" existing to line their pockets rather than discerning customers who can tell shit from shinola). File sharing is just a convenient excuse for the Industry to try and justify their own misguided attempts at creating false scarcity to generate profit, and that profit has now given them a lust for power and control which is not attainable in an age of communication that bypasses the traditional gatekeepers. The rise of the internet has CHANGED the dynamics of the equation irrevocably but they aren't ready to acknowledge that the world has moved on...

Sorry fellas, there's simply more of us than there are of you. It's time to find something else to exploit.

... Oh, wait a minute. I guess that is exactly what they are attempting to do...