BPI's Pirate Purge - Ready to be Warned for 'illegal' Mp3 Downloading?

Agreed, excessive downloading is not good - but if companies insist on charging £15 for an album with only 5-6 decent tracks on it, can you really blame people for going online to get the tunes?

Yes of course, but like anything (ie. copying CD's, taping off the radio etc.) as long as it doesn't damage the whole music industry as much as it apparently is at the moment, they won't mind as much. Curbing is all they want.

''doesn't damage the whole music industry as much as it apparently''
i notice the word 'apparently' meaning that they get their statistics from the uk chart. maybe its just that the cosumer isn't fooled as easily as it was not so long ago into buying crap music.
you can hardly argue the fact that certain pop bands do rubbish because people are downloading their music and not buying it. people aren't downloading or buyng their music, because it is pitiful and quite often a rip off of old songs. (majority of boy bands/girl bands) and anyone who does argue that fact is an idoit put simply.
granted alot of good music possibly doesnt sell as well because of people downloading, and there's nothing worse for a band/the industry than having a highly anticipated album leaked onto the net a few weeks/months before (as with Elephant)
it wont effect me as i dont download that much anymore. i doubt itll change anyones attitude towards downloading and the potential benefits/negative effects of it. if a band is worth listening to its worth buying their album and going to see them live. the internet just gives you the choice to listen to music beforehand rather than trusting a magazine on whats good and whats not, nd basing your decision to buy music on that.
little thought - how long do you think itll be before the cinema industry starts complaining about the lack of dvd sales and blaming the availability to download movies?

I know someone who got a warning 6 months ago, so he changed his ISP and p2p client and hasn't had a peep since. I think they will start by targetting people with ridiculous amounts like 10,000 mp3s on their hard drive. It'll be a while before they get to the people who are trying before they buying. And I totally agree on this if you want to try and then buy the album (like most on here) why arent there more services where you can listen to the cd?

and as well i have cds on my hard drive how they gonna know i havent downloaded them!? its all a bit crazy

The fact is much more that there's no correlation between the downturn in the music industry and the amount of music being downloaded.

The music industry has, in a pretty consistent fashion, since the mid 90s refused to invest long term in artists. It used to be that bands could prove themselves over two (or, shock horror, three) albums.

Singles have been borderline profit material for sometime and have more recently come to be a loss leader for albums. But pop acts have a short shelf life, so they're forced to look for another quick fix to manage the profits for the shareholders, and so talented BANDS go by, and so the vicious circle continues.

What the debate should really be about is whether the idea of copyright as it's evolved since the 1600s is really relevant in todays society.

I think the idea or paying a monthly fee then being able to download as much as you like is much better then per download although in a profit making sense it doesn't but from the user perspective it does. Another reason that i think that mp3s are good are as people have posted earlier that if you look a band that aren't popular no matter what genre then it can be a lot of hassle to find a cd of theirs but you have more chance of finding it on a fileshare system perhaps the music industry should take that into account.

This should only really be aimed at people that download whole albums from various artists, not so much a song or two here or their. Thanks to Kazaa I have purchased albums from Portishead, Hopesfall, Vaux, Bjork, Sigur Ros and STUN that I wouldnt even have considered purchasing before.

Hey come on...enough of the "I try before I buy" BS.

Simple fact....the music industry, and the artists, have been syphoning money from us ever since the first 7" sinlge was brought out. Christ all you need to do is watch MTV Cribs to see that even the most unknown "gangsta rapper" is making millions at our expense.

So, f*ck it (insert corporate money grabbing recording label here) IT IS NOW MY TURN TO TAKE A PIECE OF THE PIE..like it or lump it dickheads.

Blur's Dave Rowntree has hit back at the BPI following the warnings it plans to issue to online song swappers.

The British Phonographic Industry is set to following the RIAA when they launch a new campaign threatening legal action against people who illegally use P2P or uploading music to the internet.

Its the first move by an industry trade association outside the US.

The BPI plan to send instant messages to peer-to-peer filesharing networks warning users that if they do not stop they may face legal action.

The drummer contacted NME following the news, he said "It's so difficult for artists to speak out without pointing fingers because artists make money from the sale of records and it's seen as if we want the best of both worlds."

"I'm certainly not saying 'File sharing is great but I also want to make a living out of selling records', Rowntree explained. "What I'm saying is if the BPI wanted to take a stand, then the time to take that stand was a number of years ago and do it in a kind of inclusive and grown-up way rather than now posturing and spitting like a bunch of schoolyard bullies. This will only lead to a bunch of 12 year-olds being taken to court as happened in the States which will serve nobody and nobody will make a penny."

Speaking about down P2P networks, Rowntree told NME.com "It's something that you can't un-invent. The time to have taken action would have been around the Napster time when Napster were holding out the olive branch - we should have taken it and started working with them to get models whereby people who downloaded music from the Internet paid for it so that it became commonplace from early on."

He added. "Since some bad decisions were taken then - now the whole industry is on the back foot."

"It's the musicians who generate the money - the record companies may think it's them but actually it's the musicians - so the will of the fans and the will of the musicians will out eventually, I have no doubt. But if the BPI want the bloody nose along the way fair enough, but as long as everybody's aware that it's not the performers who are doing this - it's the BPI."

I have no sympathy for the industry they have been ripping us off for years.

I absolutely *love* that picture. Where did it come from?

Everyone here loves music and values it: We are not the majority.
The massive availablity of music generally has devalued it. It's everywhere and just like nobody now likes paying 'proper' prices for airline tickets, it will start to seem too much to ask £13 for a CD when you don't know many songs from it.

Those people for whom music is a lifestyle accessory and not the life blood we all know it is, will stop paying the inflated prices the industry has been charging.
When profits go down the industry will make cuts and you can be sure it won't be the ropey chart bands they get rid of.

How can you put a price on a song anyway though? You're just comparing to what you're used to paying (although you're being unfair considering that the average CD price is about £10.50 [this was surveyed by an independent 3rd party a while back]).

What's wrong with £3 or £4 for 3 songs? That's better value than albums in most cases.

"The point someone made about knowing whether songs on your hard drive are legal or illegal is a good one. I download a lot from artist sites and legal download sites such as Epitonic.com. How do they make the distinction?"

It's not necessarily about you having tracks on your hard disc. What's illegal in this case is sharing them with others when you don't have permission to do so.

Is copyright relevant?! Now more than ever, surely?! More people, more music, more musicians, more fans, better tracking technology. Artists/authors/creators have a moral right to control what happens to the work that they produce, be that allowing people to buy copies of it for a certain price by certain means, giving it away for free, or keeping it to themselves, it is totally up to them. In a lot of cases, abolishing copyright would discourage creatives from bothering to create anything (knowing that any can rip it/them off).

yeah it's a real disappointment to buy a CD and then realise it does nothing for you-and actually sysematically returning CDS over and over again (as i've done) just gets really irritating-especially if the one you swap it for leaves you cold aswell!

downloading music has changed my life- honestly! I have heard so much stuff that is impossible to get hold of- mad remixes, random songs by Kleenex, white labels, its just fantastic. And i have bought loads of great albums i love from hearing it first thru p2p, aswell as spending more money on going to gigs because i'm not buying duff records anymore.

The record industry have been seriously slow on the uptake and screwed over the consumer for a long long time. They should spend less on 80 million pound vanity deals with robbie williams and mariah carey or michael jackson and search harder for bands and artists capable of making records that are worth buying in their entirety.

I'd be more against file-sharing if albums by lesser known artists were more readily available in the UK.
I have no local indie stores nearby, just one HMV. The selection of music in places like that is appalling. There's the rock/pop section which is great IF you're looking for a band on a major that has sold thousands already.
The "metal" section is incredibly small and only really caters for those who want the heavy shit, which I don't.
If I want an album I can't find in HMV, I have to go into london, so I end up paying £5 (the price of travelcard) more than the album's actually worth everytime I buy something.

We either need the bigger shops to widen their variety or we need more locals that specialise in obscure and hard to find music, so people who don't have credit cards, can't afford import prices and trips into the nearest city every week can get the music they're after without huge fuss.

Kill Rock Stars is a great example, Ive downloaded stacks of deerhoof tracks from there and even though there albums are hard to get hold of, I still bought 2 of them imported from america.

I have a mate who is a website buff and hes shown me a way to download regular .ram and .wma files. Its piss easy really but there are some places such as record labels like beggars baquet who use streaming media but they have some kind of script which makes it impossible for you to find the original source being streamed, hence it being impossible to download. The only way you can really get round this is if you want to record it in your computer while its playing but you need a fairly shit hot computer to do this. It is however just gonna be like recording off the radio as they make the quality for streams fairly low. Having said all this, I know beggars do it for a fact and a few other sites, but they will only put 1 track on, which really isnt enough for a taster of an album. So at least someone is halfway there, they just havent realised what it is they've got yet...

Well, look at it this way- if the "mp3 downloading sends music bust" argument was actually true, then I reckon that the internet would have bankrupted the porn industry 100 times over by now!

i read something the other day, which was sort of interesting.

about itunes:
Britains version of itunes is selling songs at 79p and most albums at £7.99, undercutting most of its rivals.
Some experts question the sustainability of these prices which give apple little in the way of profit.

about consumers:
Alan giles chief executive of hmv.
''The customers expectation is that they should be able to buy intangible digita music much more cheaply than than the amount they pay for a physical collectable cd. But the cost (of making and packaging the cd) is a tiny part of the product cost. It is going to be difficult to persuade contumers to pay a price that is sustainable in the long term''

it made me think what is the main cost of producing/selling a cd? i thought the cost of travel.
and surely making the music digital means you dont have to pay to transfer the music from place to place (as it isnt a physical product.)
does it cost that much to put a music file onto a computer then share it to everyone?