I sometimes feel bad when pirating music.
Not usually. I feel an artist's first obligation is to entertain, not to make money. While money is great, I simply don't have any of it anyways, so I'm not going to enjoy great music legally. Whenever they come to town I'll happily go to their shows, except the never do anyways.
I would buy my music, I just can't pay for it. I'd have a hell of a time finding a record store around here that puts up metal anyways, and I don't like sending money into cyberspace for a few megabytes of binary.
a lot of people dont have money to spend on music legally. their only way to enjoy the music from their artists is illegally. me personally, i dont, i use this thing called "zune pass" though... works for me.
but again though, people are going to steal music, i just dont enjoy people going around promoting the websites and junk.
again though. stealing music, is in fact, a bad thing. cause although a bands purpose is to entertain, if you want them to continue to even release materiel at all, they need money.
another little fun fact on how the industry typically works so people can further understand the situation.
when artists go to record labels and start being promoted by places like "victory", "roadrunner", "virgin", "rise", or "epitaph", usually what goes down is that the label gives them a loan essentially, contracts are written on what they can and cant spend it on and on what the label well "give" to them.
from their, bands use that money for stuff like managers, promotionalists, gear (if not sponsored), and other stuff. tickets are sold, band merch is sold, CD's are sold, and with all that money, you have to pay the label back that money, usually with some interest so they can make profit. the money remaining is YOUR profit.
it may sound like you aren't making a ton of money here does it. probably cause you aren't. typically the profit you personally make is very minimal. this is of course if you are just starting out for a minor label and such. labels also typically make a deal with the studio time and music videos and such, depending on how big of a band you are. i digress. anyways, bands starting out usually dont make a whole lot of money. once you start working your way up though, the profit will work its way in. so essentialy, the bigger the fan base, the more profit. but thats pretty obvious
