[Leonis]

Originally posted by Grojlach: Leonis, but do you think you would get even half of the publicity without the Internet? At least now your music gets heard on a larger schale then before I reckon, while without the Internet not that many would have bothered in the first place. At least now there's a basis to sell music on, at least now you are actually able to reach people and slowly getting better known. Building a career starts with sowing and investing time and effort to get known well, the real fans will buy your music anyways and those are exactly the ones who will bother buying your CD's at the start. Those who only have an occasional mp3 with your music and no intention of buying the real album wouldn't have bothered getting it under normal circumstances either. And if "your favourite alt band dissapears because no one is buying their music", then that would probably also have happened in a world without the Internet. I'm convinced that my favourite alt bands all profited from the Internet, both publicity- and record sale- wise, if only because I would never have gotten into their albums if it wasn't for the samples I was able to download online. Nonetheless, about your last point: the artists who are obviously against illegal copies (Metallica, Dr. Dre) are practically all bigger artists who have already "made it" without the help of the Internet, and they technically wouldn't profit that much publicity-wise because of the Internet anymore, like most "big" artists. I really have no problems at all if all those songs were banned from AudioGalaxy or whatever program you are/were using, because if I really were interested in hearing a new Metallica song (which I'm not, I couldn't care less, but just picture it for this hypothetical situation ), I could just turn on the tv or the radio and it will be played in no time. However, that's not the case with my favourite band's music, there's no tv or radio airplay whatsoever and their entire means of presenting themselves *is* the Internet - their entire way of getting known is based on hear'say and mouth to mouth recommendations, and the best way people are checking out those recommendations is by downloading some songs off the Internet; AudioGalaxy being a large presentation portal at that. Now that AudioGalaxy is closed down by the big companies who weren't actually profiting from it anyways, the smaller bands are the ones who suddenly see a great way of presenting themselves to the public disappear. Theoretically, if there were independent bands who had large ethical issues with AudioGalaxy and co. (which is hard to understand, but alas), then they have a right to have their songs blocked on those programs. However, the chance that I will be able to hear samples of their music and at the same time the chance that I will actually end up buying any of their albums will rapidly decrease at that point, as I don't buy music I've never heard of (I'm not *that* rich ). In other words, they will probably miss out on a lot of publicity *and* record sales... But let's say, hypothetically speaking, the record sale part isn't true. Now what is the # 1 way artists make their money? With record contracts? Definitely not the "smaller" artists. It's live concerts. Ticket sales are (probably, in case you're not "known" yet) based on the publicity beforehand; from that perspective, having your songs blocked on the Internet isn't really helping. But alas, artists should have their say in whether their music should be freely available or not, I'll give you that. It's just that I think the Internet does more good than actual harm to the large majority of bands around nowadays, and it's hard to picture any starting artists who don't have a large record company backing them with huge publicity campaigns saying no to free Internet publicity.

Good points Grojlach, I think we're closer than I first thought on this. Incidently it's my understanding (from personal experience and study) that live concert tickets alone don't really make profit. It's the generated CD sales, but more so than that, the biggest $$$ are in...marketing.
T Shirts, posters, programs, pins, socks, underwear, whatever can be branded. *Most* concerts make a small profit on the expenditure. Of course at grassroots it's still pretty much 'pay to play' in one from or another...(at least it is here)