SHEEP? What the hell are you talking about, "Help artists, Pirate MP3s"??????
Are you a complete idiot? You say 1 dollar off of every album goes to the ar****... If everyone listens to you and pirates MP3s, THEY WILL HAVE NO MONEY AT ALL, because that 1$, you took it from them by pirating!
(The following uses completely random numbers)
Say that on the gnutella network (or any other sharing software), one song from an artist gets downloaded, say, 20 times a day.
If each person that downloaded the song bought the album instead, that would be $20 a day for that artist! Going along the same line, that's $140 a week, $600 a month! If you suppose that the artist has at least 5 popular songs that are downloaded to the same amount, you can easily calculate $100 a day, $700 a week, or $3000 a month!!!!!!!
Now, place yourself in the artist's mind. You have 3 albums out, of which 5 songs are popular. You go on BearShare or KaZaA or WinMX, and look for your songs. You notice that you get around 100 hits for each song, on each different network... Here's your choices. You:
a) Get very excited at the fact that there are thousands of instances of illegal reproductions of your work on the internet, meaning you are very popular (in the illegal world)
or
b) You get very ****ed off because EACH INSTANCE OF THAT SONG ON THE NET MEANS $1 LESS IN YOUR POCKET, thus you are LOOSING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!!!
So, which is it going to be, "sheep" (that's the unregistered poster just before me), are you seriousely going to be happy you are loosing thousands of dollars???? I don't think so.
I personnaly DO download mp3s, and share them also. But when I have the money, I don't go buying blank CD's and making copies of albums when I like them. I BUY THE REAL CD. I have NO album copies, except those of foreign albums, like japanese video game music.
That was just my 2 cents.
Best Regards,
Sir Lucas S Daniels
ericsl@softhome.net