Media Piracy: Good Economics?

As an underground hip-hop artist, I've come to understand one thing - Anyone who is going to pirate your music is someone who wasn't going to buy your shit in the first place.

The RIAA wants to say that P2P on the net and the proliferation of CD burners has caused a significant slide in sales - which is hogwash. In reality, almost all music is marketed towards females 12-29 years old - a demographic that isn't as tech saavy as males of the same age.

In layman's terms: Niggas will bootleg your shit, females largely will not.

The real reason why you don't see artists going 10x platnium anymore is because listeners today have an ever-decreasing attention span. This is why you see artists drop a new single literally every month. With so many music choices in the mainstream and in the underground, you can't ride out an album for 18 months like people used to do. You literally have to be in the studio working on the next album roughly 3 months after you drop an album. This is why the mixtape scene has exploded, because it keeps people's attention with new music at a relatively low cost.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Quote:

First of all, how is it conducive to a free market to say that a commodity ("information") which is all over the place and easily available, is legally owned by one person or corporation, and only they have a right to decide what happens with it

Except that we have a thing called copyright law which means that if you write a book, produce a TV show, record a song, that you have the sole right to distribute it in whatever way you want.

The example you provided isn't an accurate representation of what's really going on.

There's nowhere I can't reach.