[irresseni]

I own one single mp3. It was a rare song, out of print, that I was able to track down on the web. I have almost 1000 pieces of vinyl. Those are mostly from my youthful collecting. I rarely buy vinyl anymore. Mostly I buy CDs, though I still have almost twice as many albums as CDs. I don't like the idea of P2P. For the first couple of months I had DSL, I had no firewall (my own fault), and my computer got hacked. Someone set my machine up as a slave P2P server running in the background. It f*ck
ed up my hard-drive. It was a huge pain in the ass. It took me days to get the machine cleared up.

This is common practice by many people "running" P2P networks (not so by the average person "using" the P2P network that is likely oblivious to the practice). The truth is, in spite of the hype about P2P being non-centralized, once any P2P network reaches a critical mass of more than a core few thousand users, they requires a hub server to route the traffic. Some people can voluntarily be a hub server (usually the makers of the software themselves set up a few server hubs, parading on the network as if they are common users), and when that cannot support the capacity of the given P2P community, they send out bots, pinging for unprotected static IP addresses (IE: Users of DSL, or cable modems that don't have a firewall... and MOST broadband users still don't have a firewall). Thousands of people out there on the web are bitching to their ISPs about their terrible service, "I'm paying $50 a month for broadband and my connection is slow as crap...", when all the while they don't realize their machine has been hacked and is being used as a hub on some P2P network.

Everyone is to blame.

The P2P community are disingenuous freeloaders. "I didn't steal this music", but somebody did, and some musician isn't getting paid for their work. "I don't hack people's computers", but some-else did for you to be able to get music on your P2P network.

The ISPs who should be more up front with their customers about the dangers associated with a broadband connection and the necessity for a firewall (the ISPs don't want the responsibility or the cost).

The music industry for being so god damn greedy. The largest overhead for a CD is distribution. Next, depending on the amount of promotional, is either advertising or manufacturing. From the numbers I've read, the cost of the intellectual property is usually the least expensive component factored into the price of the product.

Even Apple is doing this wrong. They've basically put music online at the same price as a CD, but with the convenience of being able to purchase individual songs. So what. They just want a fatter margin with lower overhead.

The right way to do this is to lower the cost to a profit margin comparable to a CD, MINUS the manufacturing and distribution costs. You would snag a huge piece of the online pie if you sold a song each for 15 or 20 cents. That would still probably beat the margins on a CD. One can say, 'Oh, that still cannot compete with FREE!' So you package in added value, say a simple TXT file that includes the lyrics as part of the download. For most people that is incentive enough for 20 cents.

The music industry won't do it. They won't do it because they are in panic and they don't want to cannibalize their own CD sales. Therefor they artificially inflate their downloaded music price so it won't "compete" with their CD price. All the while their CD price is already BEING cannibalized by FREE music downloads.

Idiots, idiots every one of them...

There is my 2 cents.