daniel wrote:If Dödens Grav won't read another person's complete posts, why give a shit what he says. He's always on some hero of the band's trip anyway if he deems them worthy.
Your inept English makes it difficult to even understand what you're trying to say. Regardless, to assume that my comments had anything to do with the fact that the album you downloaded was an album that I liked is a pretty stupid thing to do. However, since you were so entirely offended by the fact that I only read and responded to the single piece of a post that was even relevant to what I had previously written, I will do you the personal courtesy to respond to Cochino's entire post in the hopes that we can mend our relationship once more.
Cochino wrote:Is this a moral thing? If we're going down moral road then why not let people listen to stuff before deciding to buy or not so they don't have to waste their money in something they don't like? How is that wrong?
When is the last time that you stumbled upon a new album that didn't have a sample somewhere online for free? Hell made a fucking music video for Christ's sake. There are samples for just about anything that you could want to buy available through approved means such that it's impossible to justify illegal downloading with that argument. The argument that that you may not like an album after you buy it means that you should be able to hear the album through any means necessary is also utterly ridiculous. It's not like buying a hammer, which, if faulty, is an objectively bad hammer and for which you should be entitled a refund. If you don't like a musical recording, that is not the band's fault, since it's a matter of opinion, and they are in no way wronging you or taking advantage of you if you buy an album that you don't enjoy. Actually, to think that is, to be blunt, really fucking stupid.
Cochino wrote:You can't compare cultural possessions with material ones. What if a friend of daniel's burned a CD for him to check it out? Would that friend be a criminal or something?
What do you mean by "cultural possessions"? Art, music? Well, considering you can't buy "music" and you can't listen to "music", as in the ethereal concept of a particular song, you have to do the next best thing and buy a commercial product of a particular rendition of that "music". So no, you can't compare cultural possessions (by which I take you to mean art) with material goods, but what we deal in IS goods. Music is inherently a product in itself, either way. And no, I don't believe burning a CD for somebody else's use is an approved avenue of exchange. Purchasing a CD does not give one the authority to reproduce and distribute it to other people in any way. I don't care if this is how tape trading worked "back in the day", and that this is what the underground was built on and everything else in this regard that you can possibly feed me, because it's still technically wrong, even if bands approve of distributing their music this way (assuming that it was a commercially released product and not something self-released like a rehearsal tape that a band encourages people to share; when an album is released by a third party, they too have certain rights over the product element of the music, you know).
Cochino wrote:Besides all that, if there' are bands who benefit from mp3s that's gotta be bands like Hell. I doubt this album would've been released or sold half the copies it has sold if it wasn't for the demo mp3s that got spread around in the last 10 years or so.
While this may be true, it's also equally irrelevant. Besides, what was pirated was material (largely) that was never even officially released and unavailable for purchase either way. To make the argument that because a band from the 80s is relevant today only because of the persistence of tape trading and mp3 sharing, that entitles one to continue to pirate new music that they record, is absolutely beyond any form of reason.
Cochino wrote:But go ahead and buy that "downloading is stealing" bullshit that the mainstream media tries to feed you. If they're behind all that you should suspect there's something wrong about it.
This is completely childish, moronic, and silly. Do you still refer to police as "the man"? The mainstream media also feeds us things like murder is bad. Should I suspect that something is wrong about the notion that I shouldn't murder random people out of the joy that it brings me? Or is it possible that whether or not the mainstream media supports a proposition is overwhelmingly irrelevant to whether or not that proposition holds any merit when measured under scrutiny? I swear, downloaders are the absolute fiercest defenders of their behavior in the world, short of theists.
Cochino wrote:What made the underground strong back in the 80s weren't the big labels, it was tape trading which eventually led to smaller labels to release those demo bands. Nowadays it's done through the internet instead of mail but it's got the same results. There weren't that many niche labels like Stormspell, Shadow Kingdom, Nuclear War Now! and the like.
I already said this earlier, but whether or not the underground operated through certain means has no bearing on whether or not it should have. Besides, most of what was tape traded was demos and rehearsals, things that were never officially released by a third party, leaving the entirety of the rights up to the bands, and a lot of bands had no problem with dubs (although not all of them; Witchfinder General comes to mind). But tape trading was done largely to sample music that you had no other way of hearing. NOW you do. It's absolutely more difficult to try to find a release that you
can't sample for free without obtaining it through some unapproved mean than it is to find a sample of a release that you want to buy.
Cochino wrote:And regardless of all that, and even if downloading mp3s was stealing, daniel still has all the right in the world to say whatever he feels about the music and he's not less qualified than any of you because he didn't buy the album. We're talking about music here, not collections.
You are aware that nobody ever discounted what daniel said about the music on the grounds that he illegally downloaded it, right? Not a single comment was made to the sentiment that "daniel illegally downloaded the new Hell album, therefore what he thinks of the music itself is irrelevant", so you had no reason to even say this at all. This has been entirely a discussion about downloading, not about the particular album that was downloaded in this instance. Although, amusingly, daniel did attempt to say that what I
did say earlier was something nobody should "give a shit" about because I didn't read an entire post, so if you're interested in finding ridiculous claims about the legitimacy of an argument, you can use that as an example instead of fabricating the one that you wrote about in your head.
Cochino wrote:Also, about "But hey if you can save yourself a few bucks fuck the people who actually create/put their own money up/take a chance.... ". What about bands making money from mediocre or shitty records fucking people who works hard to earn their money to find they spent it in a worthless piece of crap? Isn't that being a ripoff? Isn't that fucking people?
What makes a record mediocre or shitty is what you think about the record, and bands don't have control over that. I already said this earlier as well, but it's absolutely asinine to make the argument that because you didn't like an album and you spent money to hear it, you have somehow been cheated out of your money. You were not forced to buy it, for starters. Your money was not stolen. You simply made a purchase that turned out not to be a good one for you in particular. That doesn't mean the album itself is bad and that thousands of other people didn't happily purchase and enjoy the shit out of it. People have different tastes, so it's inevitable that just about every recording will be called mediocre or shitty by somebody after they purchased it. But if an album is really
that shitty, you should be able to tell that based on whatever samples the band or label offers of that album. If you bought an album that had free samples online by which you would be able to tell whether or not you would like it but which you elected not to sample and you didn't like the album, then that is your own fault, plain and simple.
To reiterate, this particular argument of yours is completely ridiculous and makes no sense. An album that you don't like may be "worthless" to you, but even if you're a solipsist, you're still not the only person in the world, and that album is most likely worthy for exponentially more people than you. To suggest that you were fucked or ripped off because you bought an album and didn't like it is so childish and naive that I found it difficult to even respond seriously to such a claim.
Cochino wrote:And saying that "if everybody downloads and doesn't buy" is also crap because that doesn't happen. Everybody on this site has a collection. Everybody spends lots money on music so why starting shit when they decided to check something out before spending some on it? There's too many offer and some of us don't have enough money to buy everything we think we might like.
Another absurd and illogical argument. To suggest that it's okay for some people to do something wrong because enough people do something right does not make the wrong action any less wrong or any more desirable for society. Is it okay for a few people to murder every once in a while because the overwhelming majority doesn't? Should I not maintain the position that "nobody should murder others because if everybody murdered, then nobody would exist"? Anyway, the argument behind the idea you contest is related to the bystander effect. At the scene of an accident, when a crowd gathers, sometimes everybody will just assume that another bystander has already acted to bring assistance to the scene, so they don't act. If
everybody at the scene thinks this same thing, then assistance will never arrive and the victims will surely die. Likewise, to use the line of thinking that
somebody will buy this album, so it's okay if
I download it also makes the assumption that results in the inactivity of the person in question. That in itself is not the problem, per se. The problem is if everybody, or the majority, begins to think the same way. There is an eventual tipping point between buying and downloading. If a label releases a CD that is interesting to 1000 people and prints 1000 copies of it, but 950 of those people say to themselves that everybody else will give the band/label money for their labors, so it's just a drop in the bucket if I download it for free, then the CD only sells 50 copies, and then the label decides to stop pressing CDs.
I hope this satisfies you, daniel. Now you may "give a shit" about my earlier post. Would you like me to respond to yours as well?
You argued that the difference between downloading and listening in a shop or at a friend's place is the monetary factor. So, following that, who's to say a friend in another country who bought a copy didn't just upload MP3s of the CD to Megaupload for me... But that wouldn't be right either somehow though it completely contradicts what you put forward?