MySpace has made freeloaders out of everyone. If like the article on globalvizion.net site says, if everyone would simply add one minute clips of their songs, that’s certainly enough to give away free. With today’s copy and paste songs out there anyway where all the musicians of today have to do is go into the studio and sing the first half of each song and the techie guy using pasturized Pro Tools simply copies and pastes it to the back end making a song. If you can’t figure out if you like a song after hearing 1 minute, you probably don’t like it at all, and that’s all you should get for Free. It’s amazing at how these music beggers think, don’t they realize the expense of producing a song, not to mention the years of desire to become an artist anyway, yes, even today’s homoginzed artists, meaning, where have all the Joplins, Hendricks, Grace Slicks, Heart Girls gone, etc.

If everyone posted only 1 minute clips on MySpace, then the only Pirating would be of the 1 minute clips, and that’s good advertising!

That does not apply to piracy, which is the involuntary taking of someone else’s property–which, if property is going to mean anything, they have to control–or, in the common vernacular, theft. It may be that the Internet forces entertainers into the poorhouse, but that would be a tragedy, not a natural progression. The fact that entertainers make so much money is simply what happens in a free society, where individuals make choices as to where to spend their money.

I find it amazing that some people are so cavalier in their willingness to determine how someone else shoud live their life, or to let something like piracy determine it for them. I’m in marketing, and I’m very glad that (so far) I’m free to negotiate with my employer for my salary and benefits. I know plenty of places where that’s not possible, and I certainly don’t want to live there.

A lower quality release is just fine with me for some music that I may listen to once in a blue moon (if ever again). I don’t even mind paying for a low quality release, so long as the payment is low too (viva allofmp3.com!)

Being able to go back and bump up the quality for a couple bucks works for me. I’m no audiophile, so the bit rate doesn’t bother me too much, I just like being able to pay for stuff I actually listen to more than once.

The press release also threw in a scare tactic about how will new musicians who weren’t promoted to super-stardom and a fan-base of millions by a label fare under this type of system and seems to imply that they’ll either starve or not be musicians. Instead I suspect that they’ll do exactly what musicians have done for thousands of years before recorded music allowed millions to hear their work and the same thing that musicians who are not represented by a label do now. They’ll make a more modest living. Society will recover from the historical aberration of entertainers being valued at millions of dollars. There will be exceptions as the very thing doing the correcting, i.e. the internet, will allow them to still be heard by anyone who cares to go looking. Lily Allen is a good example of a musician who made it big on the internet and then was picked up by a label after she had a large fan-base. I also suspect the radio industry will promote some artists for its own benefit.

In short, (I know, too late for that.) the only thing endangered is big business music promotion and distribution. As it dies, the health of the music scene will improve in much the same way that an old tree falling in the forest lets light reach all the smaller plants that were in its shade allowing them to finally flourish.

(I might have gotten a bit to poetic at the end but that was the analogy that came to mind. I’m sorry if anyone has a saccharine allergy.)