I feel very strongly about supporting bands and musicians. I don’t, however, like supporting the record companies that try to rape them for their own greedy purposes.
I came across this blog post over at Jeffrey Veen’s site, and completely agree with it. There’s a lot more that I’d like to write about this, and I’m sure I will someday soon, but until then, I’d like to post a link to this short article:
So is this bad? Am I hurting the artists by “stealing” their music? I was talking to Jenny Conlee, accordion player for the Decemberists, at their last San Francisco show about this. She said she would much prefer to sell stuff at the gigs, rather than through stores — though it doesn’t scale as well. She told me that if you bought their album at the mall, they might see about $.80. Amazon nets them just over a buck. But at the gigs, where they sell CDs for just $10, the band keeps half. Not to mention the percentage of the door take.
