Artists *do* make a percentage of money from album sales even if they make more from touring and merchandise. However, they do have the potential to get screwed by the label. Here is a good article by Steve Albini about how the music industry works:


http://negativland.com/albini.html


My feeling is that pirating music is wrong no matter how small amount of money the artist isn't receiving as a result.

 

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$7.87 per SONG? It didn't cost that much for the entire tape/album when it was first released for most of the music I have.

 

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what they don't tell you is your settling with the RIAA. the Actual record labels can come back later and sue you.

 

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So remember kids... Download at home, not school.

 

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gez now im so scared to use bittorents and stuff...wait is dat considered illegal? cos im in australia...is it illegal?

Well technically american industries can't come after you, but im sure they have branches inside Australia that can. I know of Warner Bro's Sweden came after the pirate bay group a couple of times, ended up with them (Warner Bros) being slammed down due to Sweden's privacy laws that pretty much protect piracy. But most of these major record lables and film industries have daughter companies in many countries, not just the US


Like so (copying and pasting from TPB's blog)


Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.


While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.


The companies that are being reported are the following:


* Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB

* Emi Music Sweden AB

* Universal Music Group Sweden AB

* Universal Pictures Nordic AB

* Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB

* Atari Nordic AB

* Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd

* Ubisoft Sweden AB

* Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB

* Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB


Stay tuned for updates.


Media-defender btw was pretty much (or still is) a program that would be downloaded as a dummy torrent and send all your personal data back to it. It was hired by many major record and film lables out there. The lawsuit is about those same record lables and film industries actually hiring hackers (through email) to DOS and attack the pirate bay website, among a few other things like steal memberlist data.

 

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