You are not merely rambling Yorick, your points are indeed wellput and legit.
You are just on the other side of the fence that I think many people haven't been and hence can't see so clearly what goes on on that side.
My major qualms are not with the atrist, so I buy the CD's even if I have downloaded songs from the internet should I find it good. If I don't like it, I don't keep the music. Really simple. I am not perfect though, and I don't claim that I ever will be mind you
. So hmm trying to end the babbling here. My qualms are with the industry and the way they actually treat the consumers. I am a consumer and when when I buy a CD of music I want to be able to at least listen to that mucis without installing tonnes of programs and crap on my computer, having difficulties to play it in a car stereo or on my DVD. I don't own a regular old CD disc player, so with all this crap they put on the CD I can't listen to it. It soathes only cponscious as I download the songs, perfectly ripped on the internet but hey, I still got the CD.
Problem here being that instead of fighting the real issue, lower the costs of the cd's and increase sell = keep the same profit, they spend billions of dollars on copyprotection that only hurts legit people. The ones doing the filesharing brakes it the minute its released.
So the consumers, the pirates and the record companies are creating a bad circle that none mentioned is ready to break. Unfortunately, the artist are left standing there. And I think that most people actually wants to see the artist paid so they could contnue making music. Just head over and look at the Toolband.com forum or Perfect circle who has a huge crowd of fans, how many listened to mp3's first then bought the record.
I am not trying to defend any side here, only try to shed some light on how I see things. Something has to be done or the only music lefft out there will be "Britney pop" (poor Britney will be the pop icon blamed here for overly manufactered music.. and overly played music for that matter as well) and less of the variety of music we wants to listen to. And it is not only the filesharers fault in my humble opinion.
On a different note, Yorick, I wish you can find the strength to continue writing and make records, and you should know that your music is well liked. Only yesterday I played some music to a firend of mine, and she said, WOW. I thought that since he was a friend of yours it was just a hobby.. but this is great