Tidus wrote: I think not. If people decide to download music, it is the music industries fault. They should add something extra with the CD that would motivate you to buy it, and not download it off the net.
While I do believe that the music industry is somewhat at fault for the proliferation of illegal downloads, I think that extras has nothing to do with it. For one, as IJ has already remarked, the industry kind of brought this upon themselves by, instead of considering the possibilities the internet had to offer, instead stuck their collective head in the sand and tried to make the big bad evil internet go away.
To me, more of a problem however, is in the very business practices of the major labels. More than ever, the industry is based on a boom or bust model of business. They grab a few bands that they think will be huge hits, hype the everloving crap out of their singles, and hope they'll be able to profit from their investment. As you would expect, this honestly doesn't work very well, and for every act they make money on, they lose money on about two or three, which results in cutting less lucrative bands from the label that could be seen as adding diversity and placing even more emphasis on their proposed hitmakers and so on and so forth.
This has had a few effects. For one thing, bands with more cult following have been almost unilaterally shoved from the majors, including such artists as Ween and They Might Be Giants, which means less diversity of music available for mainstream consumption (after all, it can be difficult to find certain independant artists in certain stores).
Second, staying power now means absolutely nothing. Rather than let artists try to grow and expand their sound, the majors work with them only as long as they'll churn out platinum records or singles, and as soon as they feel the money train is starting to slow down they completely ignore the artist and move to another one.
Third, emphasis on albums has become laughably low. Why buy the latest Hot Band release when you just know that about 2/3rds of the album is going to be crap? iTunes has alleviated this somewhat by enabling you to download the specific songs from an album you want, but this is still not addressing the problem than an awful lot of recent bands signed to majors just don't know how to make a cohesive album.
An awful lot of this also hinges on the major labels' insistence on working with payola (to wit, paying a radio station to play your songs), but that's an entirely different rant, though it shows that the reason you're hearing Boring Song X on the radio all the time isn't necessarily because people love hearing it.
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