Sony to make reselling of PS3 games illegal

[LoneWolf16]

I so hope you get mauled by a horde or roving baby seals.

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Well, there are hordes of starving baby seals now that the annual cull (for skins) has been under moratorium ...

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You mean seal clubbing? Disgusting practice. The animal lover in me demands a swift death for anybody willing to look one of those little guys in the eyes then beat them into a bloody pulp with a blunt object.

 

Then again, the sensible part of me brings up the point that starving is much worse than a brutal, but relatively quick end.

 

Why are they starving? The Orca/Shark population not doing its job or is there just a lack of food?

[Kasoroth]

still, I remember when you could do a simple web search for *.mp3 and find much of what you wanted.

 

it IS less accessible now and it is probably best for music....if the artists cannot make money, the quality of the music will go down....it is that simple.

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I disagree with you here. Personally I think that piracy is much less of a problem for music than it is for movies and games. While it is certainly a big problem for the record industry, that does not traslate directly into a problem for musicians.

 

The budget needed to record high quality music is much lower than for a high quality game or movie (while it's possible to make a fun game or entertaining movie on a limited budget, it does limit the creators options because certain types of games and movies just cost a lot to make.) In comparison to major games and movies, the cost of setting up a decent recording studio is pretty damned cheap.

 

Also, I'm pretty sure that musicians make far more money from concerts than they do from CD sales, because most of the CD money goes to the record company. When you think about it, it would be quite feasible for musicians to make good music without any copyright laws at all, in fact they've been doing it for thousands of years. In the days when vinyl was the primary medium for recording and distributing audio, it wasn't feasible for musicians to do this themselves, but distribution is no longer a problem, there are plenty of pirates (ARRR!!!) willing to distribute that music for free.

 

If musicians stopped looking at record royalties as a revenue source, and instead treated recordings as a form of free advertisement for their concerts, I think they could still make lots of money. They might even have more happy fans, and more concert (and merchandise, t-shirts, etc) revenue than they do now. The big loser here is not the musicians, it's the record companies, because their primary function is to manufacture and distribute the media to consumers, and this function is not really necessary anymore.

 

I suppose to be fair to the record companies, they do handle advertising and promotion of the records, which is useful to those musicians who get a lot of attention from the marketing department. Even this function is not really a good thing for the general quality of music though. It helps a lot to promote "mainstream" music, and this tends to have a homogenizing effect on the whole music industry, with the majority of radio stations playing the same music, and any musician who doesn't manage to get a contract from the record company (or gets a contract, but doesn't get much marketing attention) is left behind.

 

Eliminating the record companies would effectively eliminate their filtering effect on music, meaning that listeners (and radio stations) would probably need to sort through more junk to find the good stuff, but in the process they would be likely to find even more good music that they would have missed out on if they had relied on the record companies to to their filtering for them.

 

-Kasoroth