Anything wrong with Illegal music?

As much as I would like to write about the most happening thing in India right now, which is IPL. I have no idea what it stands for nor to write anything about it. Even if I tried to, my blog would end right here.  All I know is that Shah Rukh Khan realized that he had wasted his money on buying the Calcutta (Yes, I still like to call it that way) whatever team. And flew back home, to save on the five star hotel stay in South Africa.

Now I'll cut the crap and get to my topic. Though all of us do not have any sort of criminal record, we are at times constantly breaking the law. One would be speeding. I am proud to do it, since its a world wide Government money making scam. Another would be what ever has been downloaded on my PC. Which would be all the movies and the music. I am proud of that too. All 80GB of it.

Not a single mp3 file is legal in my music player. There are a certain few who would buy only legal media content. I appreciate them for their effort and honesty. But I am not going to hunt for legal content, when the pirated one's are available a click away. And then, pay for it. after going through all the trouble.

One of the first available formats was the WAV one which was insanely huge. As big as Russia. Then came the mp3 which changed everything. And ate into the revenues of the big recording companies. Convenience was the key here. One CD can hold 15 regular songs versus 150 mp3 songs. 

This coincided with the widespread high speed Internet service. File sharing services were popping center, right and left. No one can forget Napster which was King until 2001. It had over 25 million users. All the record companies pounced on it and the company was history. The irony is that they never even had one pirated song on their server. They were just the bridge for other pirates.

The recording companies had claimed that all these kind of file sharing services cost them millions in revenue. The truth is, none of those people would have taken the effort to go buy a legal copy, even if those services never existed. The latest file sharing service in courts is Pirate Bay. There was a hearing last week and were found guilty. People were still downloading while the fates of the four people behind Pirate Bay was altered. Even Pirate Bay did not have one single song on their server.

This whole process is flawed basically. If someone has to be penalized it should be the users and not the provider. No demand, no supply. Simple. The companies know the users will not have more than a couple of pennies in their pocket, so they go for the bigger fish to rake in the cash. 

Besides, if the original DVD's had cost a few bucks, no one would buy a pirated copy. I have no idea what sort of MBA degree's the CEO's in the big companies have. The MBA degree certificate is probably a fake one too. The English songs cost a $1 a pop, which is still a bit expensive considering the album has eight to ten songs in it. Charge $2 for an album, no one would look for pirated versions. The artists are not going to loose their income since the volume of sales will increase. Using that, they can buy all the dope they want.

Coming to Indian film music. I would never pay 8 bucks for an original CD. Which would have 3 remixed versions of each song. And the song themselves are stolen from another artist. Nothing wrong in stealing from a thief.