At the end of the day, why not? The companies still make a shit load of money and you get to test their product.

Quote from 2-D

but if you're a mainstream artist and your shit plays on the radio and whatnot, and you rarely make profit from albums then that would suck.

Your own post validated why even that would be helpful:

i didn't buy any music for a long time, then I felt like buying some music of these ****ing albums i've listened to literally hundreds of times.

Out of those albums you bought, would you have ever given any of them attention if they weren't available for free beforehand? A lot of people nowadays have that same kind of forward-thinking mentality of "try before you buy", a lot of people are willing to spend the few bucks on an album they already pirated just to support the artist.

Even for the ones that don't, most musicians don't make a lot of money off of albums anyway after production fees, the percentages given to the producers and other personnel, percentages to the outlet and shipping fees. Digital sales are even worse, I have a release slated for March and right now my cut is going to be 20% of 80% of 50% of $1-2 after the label, original artist and distributors take their cuts. Most successful bands make money from concert performances, which benefit from piracy because it gets their music out to audiences that might not be so open to spending $15 on a band they couldn't listen to for free beforehand.

The only people that piracy actually affects to a significant level are the massively mainstream artists, but by "affect" I mean it limits them to having only one swimming pool full of money instead of two. Other than that, piracy can benefit pretty much everyone else in at least one way or another.

All I've got to add here is about the real good South Park episode about music piracy that stated what Exilement outlined really good; the people that pirate your music are very likely to be those that turn up at your concerts and watch you perform. And to me as both a studio and performing musician, performance values so much more. It's more of what being a musician is about; playing your music instead of fiddling with it until you're sure a ****load of people will buy it to pay for your pet dog wrapped in gold and sweat of Mother Mary.

You're right 2-D, I will always pirate.

Quote from Exilement

Your own post validated why even that would be helpful:



Out of those albums you bought, would you have ever given any of them attention if they weren't available for free beforehand?

i bought demon days because of feel good inc on the radio.
but other then that, nope. If i didn't know about the rest of the songs and listened to them so much I probably wouldn't have bought the albums.