Paul Potnuru’s Blog

I was just thinking about the whole music downloads thing form a non-business perspective and then I began to think whether musicians should make music affordable or should they try and squeeze money out of it.

Music is a very “sacred” element of nature and it belongs to all of us. Some of us are more talented in music that others and they do have the right to make a living out of it.

Nowadays, musicians aren’t very passionate about music and they are more concerned about the business perspective of music. Artists should try and make their music more affordable because they make millions of dollars anyways and if they reduced the prices, they would encourage more people to go to legal sources of music instead of using illegal sources like P2P file sharing!

I think that Apple iTunes is doing a good job in reducing prices. Right now there are millions of users on P2P file sharing networks who are probably taking the risk of downloading music illegally because they are reluctant on spending $10-$15 on one album.

Real Rhapsody has come up with a service for students that offers unlimited music download for just $3 - $5 per month. This is a good move to reduce the illegal downloading activity.

I think that artists should try and promote their passion for music rather than their passion for money! The prices of music downloads should be lowered or else we will have new technologies and methods to share and download music illegally and the situation will get out of hand!

Feel free to comment on this… just don’t be too harsh

According to the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), legal music downloading has tripled in the first half of the year 2005

In the major European countries like France, Germany and the UK track sales have increased dramatically. Sales in the first half of 2005 reached approximately 180 million from January to June of 2005, as compared to the sale of 57 million tracks in the first half of 2004 and only 157 million for the whole of 2004. There have been around 10 million single-track downloads UK, up by at least ten times from the same period in 2004.

The IFPI said that this shows that more and more people are turning to legal sources of online music like: iTunes and Real Rhapsody and moving away from illegal File-Sharing and Peer2Peer due to concerns over possible damage to home computers from viruses, or the worry of being caught.

With a predicted 300 online music sites, the legal online music system is said to be successful. The IFPI emphasized that strong legal action against file sharers would continue. The IFPI claims that there are over 900 million illegally copied tracks in P2P (Peer-2-Peer) network, which is approximately a 3% rise in illegal downloads from last year.

Free Legal Music Downloads

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