I been lurking for a minute, and I have to put in my 2 cents. Illegal downloading is not cool. Alot of you up and coming producers will sing a different tune if and when you make it.
Think of all of the hours away from family, music lessons, getting told your **** is wack! Then finally make it and have have a large percentage of your revenue taken.
I bet if you owned a tire shop and on every tuesday and friday you got held at gunpoint and they took one third of your inventory plus cleaned out the cash register, you would be ready to go wild wild west!!
Then go home and tell your family that we are not eating this week, but it's ok the guys who held me up is gonna go tell everyone that I have the best tires in town. So we will make that money back...SMH
The problem with your analogy here is that tires require a certain amount of raw materials and man hours put in to make that tire into an acceptable product worthy of putting on your vehicle, mostly so that you don't roll down the highway and the tread comes off your new Firestone's.(Also, a tire shop's tires are pretty much the only form of income this person likely has. Album sales to musicians are not, they have way more opportunities to make money off their notoriety.)
The same can't really be said about music. It's value is very difficult to quanitify. Don't get me wrong, I am very aware of the amount of time, effort, and creativity, that goes into SOME albums and songs, as well as the dirt cheap CD's, notes and packaging that they include. But there is not a standard out there in music as to "a song requires 40 hours of writing. An instrumental requires 30 hours to create and mix. The recording process takes 20 hours, etc." therefore this music is worth $______.
I know there's more that goes into making some records than just that right there, but the point is....how can someone who had NO ROLE in the actual creation of the music (CEO, label exec) sit back and say how much its worth? Then take a bigger cut than the people who DID have an actual role in that process?
F*ck that. The system is flawed, and its not working anymore. Notice how it seems that the artists who speak out against DL'ing music get some severe backlash and likely lose some paying customers (Lily Allen, Metallica, etc.) while people that are embracing it (Shakira, NIN for example) are likely finding new paying customers...and a hell of a lot more people are going to hear their music, which to my understanding is THE POINT OF MUSIC...TO GET IT HEARD!!
I found these 2 pennies on the ground in a parking lot, so they're not the best quality 2 cents.
Peace!