@@ranjanbiswas3233 No not every one just most of them except the top 0.5%. The industry brought it on themselves. The artists who moved to the web proved that they did not need the greedy companies.
Yeah they convinced the artist this would be bad when the internet ended up giving them the creative freedom they wanted. Artists don’t need labels anymore.
I think the music industry solved the piracy problem in a most unique way in the end. Make music so terrible that nobody would ever bother downloading it.
There’s great music still being made, but you have to spend an awful lot of time looking for it. Of course it’s true that there is a lot of would-be artists put off pursuing a career in music since there’s no money in it. Only the top 1% make any money these days.
@@enigmatwist6548 Best to go the Spark Master Tape route. Stay anonymous, stay independent, and build a loyal following from the ground up. Platoon gon' rise. #swoup
Truthfully, I parallel this to what's happening in other mediums like comics right now. Marvel & DC have seen huge declines in sales and seemingly endless amounts of outrage from fans that are salty about what the big 2 have been doing for years now. At the same time independent sales have never been better. Likewise in the music industry, artists have vastly more resources to take matters into their own hands than before to at least make a decent living off of their work, even if they never reach super stardom. Which pretty much leaves the naive and the industry plants left in what used to be considered the "mainstream." Ultimately what this means is that it's not a downgrade in quality, but rather a shift in platform for the artists, and fans can't expect to be spoon fed anymore.... you actually have to do a bit of leg work for once. But with suggestion algorithms, it's not all that difficult to find things you like, especially on TH-cam. lol
A friend of mine was working for one of the record companies during part of this period doing royalty "clearance". The record company formula deducted all kinds of charges against sales before calculating the profit that they gave a small percentage of to the artists. One charge was for a percentage of "breakage" going back to the older, brittle phonograph records, but still charged, even against CDs. There also was that they frequently just kept the royalties in an account that were owed to lesser known artists that they didn't have contact information for and couldn't be bothered to try to find. Composers, arrangers and performers often got checks for less than $10.00 when tens of thousands of recordings had been sold. But, the RIAA insisted that the artists were the victims of piracy, when in reality the thievery was being done by the record companies, the agents and the lawyers.
THAT is a BRILLIANT analysis that never occurred to me. Why spend millions on pointless lawsuits unless it is all an act to distract from the real thievery? Makes perfect sense.
There have been cases where the company's agreement with the artist timed out but the record company kept selling the music. They never sued themselves though.
It showed the true colors of "artists" like metallica, kiss, Dr Dr, et al who sold the image of being a rebel and fighting the man, but in reality were the man.
ie every popular artist ever. You don't get to the top of billboards and become cultural phenomenon, just selling mixtaps from the back of your trunk/underground. Takes the whole apparatus of entertainment industry, to go from just another "super talented" artist to a cultural icon.
@@maxborn7400 Well, there's one rapper in my home country that already is a cultural phenomenon and everybody knows him here. Yet whenever he drops a new album (and that usually happens every summer) he makes it available to download in mp3 for free from his website. In the same time he's never been advertising anything and I don't recall any interview with him. Yet he makes good buck simply by being able to sell out a concert hosted on a biggest stadium in the country.
I think it's fucking hilarious that record labels call downloaders pirates when they in fact take such a big share of artist's money without having to do shit for it.
@@JR-xn6yu I personally think it's ridiculous that a good deal share wise is 50/50. I am lucky that I signed for a contract that has a 60% for the artists and 40% for the label. It's kind of like how steam takes so much of the share of the sale of a game. They are not doing much, but they can charge so much because they have the power to do so.
@@Jalmaan If you think about it Steam does a lot without doing much. Steam is just a great hub for games on computer. What they did was create a platform that everyone turns to because of availability, reliability, simplicity. One way to see how their doing is by looking at the direct competition. Which Steam doesn't really have, rather multiple launchers that wish people would look at them like Steam. Like look at epic games for example, they give out so many free games for the hopes of getting near steam. Steam is like the Google of launchers.
@@bigbosslive69 yea, which is why i like what the epic games store stands for, just don't like their execution in how it's done. Steam really needs to up their revenue share so devs can get more. Would be so much better for the industry
@@Jalmaan I don't know much about Steam revenue shares but really the only reason people would be there is for the amazing games that these devs produce. So I also agree people should get paid for their hard work in any field. It's just another thing to look at with these powerhouse company's, because they can really do what they want without a direct competitor.
This unlocked memories of my grandmother yelling, “you better not be stealing music & get me sued” to me & my cousins when we went over to use her computer. I miss that lady😢
As an ex signed guitarist I will tell you in the mid 2010’s we realized as touring artists that we’d rather kids got our music for free and show up to our shows and buy merch than them never getting ahold of the music at all. That was quite the revelation back then.
I was in an after school music group with my daughter at her school and the teacher was always talking about copyright infringement and such things as he knew musicians that were getting royalties from playing on some hit TV show. Then one Sunday at my church they played some older hymns out of a book and I heard a tune that was very familiar sounding even though it was very old. I found out it was a section of a piece of music we were playing in our music group from a tune that was SUPPOSED to be only a few years old. Hmm. I wonder where that came from?
The Japanese music industry is the most ridiculously hardass about this, and has never even warmed up to any kind of digital distribution. Consequently only members of freakishly esoteric communities in the U.S. (which makes up about half of the world's music market) are aware that Japan has ever made music. Meanwhile the Koreans have gotten to #1 in the U.S. by putting 4K quality videos on YT and pushing them to get millions of views and a dozen K-pop acts are touring the U.S. right now.
@@I_Have_The_Most_Japanese_Music The Japanese are absurdly stringent about digital distribution and image licensing. Sega almost killed a blooming game franchise because they couldn' iron out the image and voice licensing of the main character - who was a boy band singer if I'm not mistaken.
We went into touring with that mindset. But by the time we were booking Big tours and crossing the country, the music industry had gone to shit. I had become "You fit the bill, you go broke touring, your go broke for studio time, and then if you're successful, we wanna sign you" Then the icing in the cake is the offers you get require you to provide said company with at least 3 albums and you can't do your own thing in between them. We did all the left work, and once we had offers we all quit.
Sounds bad and there are greedy scumbags out there. But imagine someone honest being a label. Say they're paying for everything up-front. It's a risk. If you liked a band would you gamble $300k on what sell zero? Music videos made no money for anyone except MTV who kept all the ad revenue. The videos were at times million dollar commercials for the music. Artists made most from radio royalties and touring. 50c a cd is low, but if it was 50/50 and a video was $200k, the artist might not be able to drop $100k, so the label gets more equity since they bear more risk. Studio time, session players, producers, engineers and other marketing add up too. David Byrne's book on music has a great breakdown of costs as an indie artist.
@@BenWeeks I actually knew an artist in high school. She wrote her own music and had to pay the costs up front. So there are cases of artists eating the costs. And even when the company covers those costs, it makes more sense to do that to an unknown. Why do you think so many big names end up making their own record company? Because even if there is no risk they will still only be paid pennies. The standard contract with any artist for streaming is even worse, and the costs for the company is even lower. Pandora, for example, pays an artist pennies and there's np up front cost making this a CDs. Instead, the infrastructure cost is the same no matter who it is and of no one likes the music they will just press the skip button and the artist won't be paid at all anyway.
Depends on the company/artist. most of the ultra popular artists don't even write their own music, they have ghostwriters doing that, they are basically just "mascots".
Hi. Thanks for this video. I can confirm as a primary source that I did file for bankruptcy and the RIAA never got a dime. It’s nice to see a retrospective like this showing that the people who fought back were found on the right side of history, that scaring people into an antiquated business model was never going to work.
@@joeltenenbaum7662 good for you for sticking up for yourself and ‘the little guy’ for so many years. Absolute legend, glad they never got a cent from you.
Thank you for paving the way for means like Spotify so we can now have infinite music without having to steal it or worry about what you went through lol
I think it’s not fully understood by a lot of people how severely the RIAA going after regular people for millions of dollars damaged the music industry’s reputation for decades.
Not to mention that most artists weren't behind them since they practically never saw a dime of record sales, aside from some exceptions. The secondary effect of a lot of people downloading music and discovering artists and then going to see them live is also understated.
you mean the reputations of ALL the scumbags and assholes that spent decades fucking over artists and consumers alike?.... Yeah, it's going to be tough to regain that sort of admiration.
What really angered me was when I couldn't legally make a CD from a (largely obsolete) cassette tape of music for my elderly father -- music he had BOUGHT with the record label on it, etc. The music industry wasn't interested in fair use or dealing fairly with changing (and rapidly obsoleting) electronic media -- but ONLY with making as much money as possible. Period. I remember stating that I would never feel sorry for them again re piracy. For a couple decades, I deliberately bought a lot less CD's, as a matter of principle. Ironically, in modern times, I'll buy a physical CD if it's cheaper than the MP3 equivalent, and have a nice physical backup. But otherwise, I just buy the MP3 collection, and make very sure I keep my entire MP3 collection backed up independently to multiple sources. (Luckily, large flash drives of decent speed have gotten quite cheap). Even smallish SSD's.
Funniest thing happened early this year Metallica tried to live stream a concert on Twitch and it got hit with a DMCA and had random non copyright music played over it.
The Napster affair made me realize how badly the record industry was screwing us over. Most albums only have 1 or 2 good songs on them, but we are forced to buy entire album of crap just to get those few songs that we want.
@@themonsterunderyourbed9408 oh man I'm so sorry you didn't get to experience whole albums of magic. They're still out there, tonnes and tonnes of great albums end to end, lots of shit too of course but the initial statement/comment made couldn't be further from wrong.
Which is an example of how SOME things really do get better. It's easy to buy one good song now for a buck or so, legally, as an MP3. Re the one or two good songs per album, it very much depends on the group, IMO. The best groups, it's near 100 percent songs I like. Many groups I like, it's roughly half. But yeah, for many others, to buy the greatest hits album and get 20 or so songs, of which ONE you wanted to listen to, that was a huge rip-off, so I tended to just do without owning it.
Same here. Especially the outright lies. Claiming that anyone who downloaded a song would've bought it otherwise. That's like someone handing out free samples of gouda from a wheel of cheese they bought only to get sued by the gouda factory because everyone who had a bite of that cheese would've bought a wheel if they hadn't had that free sample.
@Tomjo5 During the height of the anti-piracy craze, the record labels went after anyone who was file-sharing and claimed that every IP connected to them downloading a song equalled to the theft of one album. People were getting 5 to 6 digit fines. They knew full well that most of the people downloading those songs were teens that wouldn't have had the money to buy remotely that many albums. They just inflated the numbers so they could shake people down for more money.
@Tomjo5 I buy meat and invite you to a BBQ at my place...then the butcher knocks at your door, demanding you to pay for that meat...again... If I reverse that thinking...having the ability to procreate as a male, makes me entitled to state child funding...cuz I could in theory have children...so pay up, state!
i cant believe people are stupid enough to believe that your ISP cant see the shit thats going through their network just cause its "encrypted" like literally all web traffic. SPOILER : netflix will permaban your account if you use a VPN to illegally access shit not allowed currently in your country.
10:25 a multi millionaire sueing a single mom that's native American is pretty low. She should have countersued them for spying on her hard drive breaking privacy laws.
Everytime I’m in traffic at a red light and hear Metallica coming from someone’s vehicle, I mail Lars Ulrich a few bucks so I won’t get sued for listening for free.
Well we can listen to songs on the radio I was poor growing up so I saved to get a tape deck stereo and a brick of tape and recorded songs on the radio. So was I illegally copying music cause I wasnt buying it????
I was in college during that period, and my Music History professor correctly predicted the industry should embrace downloading and that it actually would help artists get free exposure.
Exactly, any one who pirates isn't going to purchase anyways. So there is 0 loss. Piraters are future customers. You know who pirates, kids and broke college kids who don't have money. Once they get a job they are the ones actually buying the games on steam and subscribing to spotify and itunes.
Yup. I worked with a woman who wore a pin that said "Piss me off, and pay the consequences". I remember her slamming her office door on some jerk, and the sonic boom sound that resulted, and picturing, comic book style, the entire large 3 story office building crumbling to dust as her office, closed door intact, stood undamaged... That didn't happen of course, but as her number 2, I told the jerk that NO ONE on MY team (I was the team leader, she was the brains of the outfit) was going to help him AT ALL until he apologized to her and meant it. That was a very satisfying day at work. But yeah, piss the wrong woman off and she justifiably goes fists up -- and good luck winning THAT.
She should of been honest about the download though, that's what left a sour taste in the jury mouth. Though I think they were set up to be honest. For those wondering, I don't cuc to the RIAA, I sail the seven seas
After what they did to her, and school children for downloading a few songs, and the countless artists under them who gave them the rights over their art, I wouldn't have given them anything at all. Bankruptcy is a small price to pay for integrity and the satisfaction to what was coming to these criminals --the *real* criminals.
they realised what was happening and monetised it. I think it's hilarious that we don't use ipods anymore and pay to use Spotify. we are literally just paying them to download it for us. because that's the only hassle Spotify takes from you is having to download a song and put it on your phone. which you still could do for free if you wanted to
@@Brandon-cv9uh yeah but being able to pull up any song (not literal of course) that someone around u might wanna hear instantly is cool and no matter how big ur hard drive is u cant hold enough for all tastes
Greed played a big role in this. In the pre-digital age records were fairly affordable. When CDs came out the industry promised us that prices would drop as they ramped up production. It did not. Prices remained about 2 to 3 times the price of a vinyl record at that time. People wanted affordable music. The internet only made that easier to get.
exactly! they priced them selves out of the market and to top it off they took a ludicrously high cut and left the actual talent with a tiny fraction of a %.
What, you mean paying $16 ($24 adjusted for inflation since 2001) for only 2-4 good songs on an album with the rest filler garbage was overpriced? Nooooo.
Yep, that’s pretty much the size of it. Cassettes never increased in price, but as vinyl was phased out it became more expensive until it was removed altogether (at least this was the case in the UK). Once that happened, CDs just got more expensive. Small wonder people resorted to copying music.
@@dread-cthulu There was no money to get. If a car is stolen from you, and you wake up finding the exact same car there, as if it were a copy, would you feel robbed?
Why would anybody go to work, and then give away their product for free, and get zero hourly wage payment? You? Musicians making music is their job, record companies are their employers. Are you really this dumb? I already know you are, just by your statement.
The sad part is, these people the RIAA decided to make examples out of were probably nothing compared to what my neighbor was supposedly doing. During the file sharing era, he bought himself a CD burner and would make CDs with any songs you wanted for a flat fee, $5 or something. Never got caught.
You have crooks on Etsy doing this same shit today with cassette tapes. They claim they are selling their personal artwork as a tape label and the music is free.
Man everyone was doing this. I didn’t know a single person who didn’t have a bunch of burnt CDs in their car. It got to the point where every single soul had limewire, we all knew how to burn cd-r’s by the time we were teenagers, and it’s crazy they outed these 2 people when I personally knew 50+ people within a 5 miles radius lol
Imagine if people starting coming out saying they all pirated until the IRAA wasn't able to even pursue legal action. They would have bankrupted themselves.
Same if EVERYONE stopped paying their mortgages, what could the banks do? Foreclose on the mortgage and put it on the market to get bought by another person that wouldn't pay the mortgage? Also taking them ALL to court wouldn't work as the courts wouldn't have the time to hear all the cases.
@@BlueSatoshi Sure. But it couldn't be that hard to equate it to giving away bootleg CDs for free. I can't imagine anyone decent choosing to charge tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per song. I mean I can believe it because it happened, but it's really very disturbing. Corporate propaganda is incredibly powerful.
When you pirate music... you're stealing from the record company because they get 99% of the money anyway, not the artist. The artists make their money from merch and concert tickets. Fuck the industry. If you want to support a band, acquire their music however you want, and then donate them money directly on patreon/etc.
@@markusr353 you are correct, if i go into a museum that hosts a super big diamond and I duplicate it using a high tech duplication ray gun. And i put the duplicate my room. Did i steal it?
You know why pirating took off? CD’s cost $18, only had one or two good songs on them and if you got a scratch on it you were buying the whole damn thing again. It wasn’t uncommon to buy the same CD two or three times just from damage especially if you were sliding it in and out of a CD carrier. The argument that people were downloading music they already owned was probably truer than you might assume.
How were you handling CDs that you had multiple or common instances where you bought more than one copy because of damage? I graduated college in 94, so was right there during the CD boom, and I've never damaged any of my CDs to the point that I had to buy another one. Price-wise, yeah, they were expensive, which is why those mail-order 99 cent CD companies were so popular.
@Blitzen RC That would kind of be the "how do you handle CDs" part of my question. Why would you have a bunch of CDs sliding around on the backseat of a car? I always had my CDs in those protective books that held 100 or 200 CDs.
Also around 2003 the RIAA started flooding the file sharing networks with fake and corrupted copies of popular music. At first the fakes were too short in length and too small in file size to be the real thing, making them easy to avoid, but then they started uploading files that appeared to be the correct length and size, but when you downloaded them, they would play for about 30 seconds and then start making loud screeching noises. This drove away many users, because it often became nearly impossible to find legitimate copies of popular songs among all the fakes. And meanwhile, the record companies started putting out "copy protected" CDs that could not be played on a computer without installing special software that would limit your ability to make copies of the CD, and would actually install a rootkit virus on your computer. Sony Music was the biggest proponent of this system, and after a class-action lawsuit was filed, they stopped making copy-protected CDs, released software to remove the virus, and offered to recall and replace the copy-protected CDs with regular, non-protected CDs.
I remember the panic in everybody’s face when the police came on a bi-monthly basis to our college dorm to check if we were stealing music. 1996-99 was just a different time
@@atlascheethac7869 oh shit I'm also south African but I'm young I didn't know it was a thing back then because now no one cares. I also heard alot of artists where banned under apartheid.
RIAA: we are here to protect artists. CD costs 75 cents to produce, artist makes 50 cents per cd, company sells cd for $17 making $15.75 profit. Remind us again RIAA who the thieves are🤔
Then artists don't have to make deals with record companies. But they do, because companies provide them with marketing and exposure. It's not pure profit.
Closer to 25 cents. I remember an idiot Congressman complaining that CDs were all printed in South Korea, wanted the jobs back in the US. The printing companies were making a fraction of a cent profit per CD. The international shipping cost was inexpensive too. Almost all the $17 price tag was split between the retailers and the record labels, with a small percent to the artists. The reason CD sales collapsed was because most CDs only had one song anyone wanted to listen too. $17 a song vs $1 on iTunes was what killed CDs. Albums that had multiple good songs were the big sellers of CDs in the 80s and 90s because the price per good song fell. An interesting result of the $1 song has been the trend in artists touring instead of pumping out studio albums. The artists tend to earn their living from live performances these days, instead of from album sales. So it has been a great era for live music.
Aye Aye! This is FACT. Artists protected their only "middle man" as it was their only source of revenue. Nowadays they can sell their work directly for a smaller price and get way more money without those middle man recording / retailer companies. Not to say I dont support music stores, after all there's plenty of peoplo who collect CDs and Vinyl still.
As someone who recorded music off of the radio all the time as a kid, and later recorded all my friends albums onto cassettes, I feel the entire thing was ridiculous.
@@drunvert CDs and records are better than mp3s but mp3s are probably better than cassette. The best thing about mp3, is the number of songs you could have on a very small device, which was portable. We take it for granted now, but it was a big thing in the early 2000s. My favorite CDs are downloaded with flac, not mp3, because file size doesn't matter anymore. Now, most people stream anyway. That was not an option back then.
@@Bauernade After so many of the boomers replaced their vinyl with CD's , CD sales dropped significantly. Corporations bought up a large number of record companies that had previously been privately owned after seeing that initial windfall of vinyl replacement. Once that windfall peaked out, like other financial bubbles, it popped.
@@Fhwgads11 imagine u spend time making a song recording it editing it and everything for someone to take it and give it out for free to anyone making ur hard work useless as a job… it’s literally theft… still disagree? What if u made a phone and had to spend let’s say $600 per phone. But then someone took ur creations copied it fully and gave it to people for free then everyone “bought” that phone instead. That would be theft right? Plus a breaking of copy right by them.. it’s the same with msuic people spend time and money to make songs and people steal them… also snout the money thing… u just are jealous of them… unlike u they actually put effort to get into that medium. And do more overall… obvious there gonna make a lot of money.. and remember, if it was u you’d be doing the same thing about piracy
Wasnt there a south park episode where piracy was affecting music artists to where they couldn't afford their premium private jet so they had to settle for a normal one lol
Yeah it was funny episode and applies to some musicians but statistically most musicians don't have it like that and aren't stable financially because of terrible deals where they don't even own their masters or publishing so it did affect those one who already getting less than 50% of revenue for their music
That was Lars on South Park but honestly look at Gene Simmons speak in the beginning of this... He's just trying to stay on top of his own greed ladder
The RIAA spent 2.9 million dollars to sue people that are barely getting by. Yet Ticketmaster is running around charging "service fees" to concert goers because they know we ultimately have no choice. Can we sue Ticketmaster? Should we? Or do we just shrug our shoulders and say "F..k it..I might as well pay the fees..."
We totally need to sue them. On the basis of legal scalping where people buy boat loads of tickets for big names, then resell them BACK on ticketmaster for 300-1000% the original price. Ticketmaster doesnt give a shit cause they get twice the fees for one ticket! Idk how this is considered legal but definitely shouldn't be!
Real question is. Who the fuck are you going to see? Modern music is garbage in all genres. And half the time you are just paying to watch someone lip sync poorly.
Reading "RIAA" also leaves a shitty taste in my mouth. I never uploaded music but these days there are alternatives and musicians still make plenty of money, specially when they have a website to download individual tracks for a small price which I support. Lucky for me, most of the music I listen to, the artists are dead or in geriatric homes :P
I think in hindsight, it’s important we look at how the government and the justice system leapt to the aid of the recording industry. Protecting capital over all else. Even to the point of going after students and poor people to somehow make amends for fictitious losses by a dying industry.
@David Lonnqvist - if you are claiming losses that treat pirated copies as equal to lost sales - as the record labels did - then that portion of imaginary money you never got and realistically never would have got are the fictitious losses.
This is America. The entire criminal justice system from the police all the way up to the supreme Court is there to protect the property of the rich, not the people
The real screwed up part about this whole riaa and file sharing story is that while they were using Shawn Fanning for Napster, the record companies were going behind the RIAA's back and asking Napster to provide data to them because they realized that people weren't just downloading music, they were making decisions about what they like and that had value. So on one side you're being sued for damages, on the other side you are being paid for user data. It's all a big mess and nobody came out of it undamaged or a head. The music industry today is nothing like it was in the 80s and 90s and nothing will ever be like that again. It's such a sad story.
No one was ever sued for downloading music. There were sued for UPLOADING music. (making the downloaded music available to others to download, a default setting of the sharing software)
As mentioned in the video, its usually meant for commercial fraud. That means an organization producing bootlegs can suffer those penalties and such an organization could cost the record companies millions on their own. The RIAA just got dumb and tried to use it on individuals. The laws in the 90s weren't caught up with the technology. And to be honest they probably never tried because of the evolving landscape to digital media.
@Zyphera The courts don't set the min/max punishment, a legislature does that. The "courts", judge or jury, decide a sentence or fine based on the established guidelines.
The court system was set up by, and made for the rich and property owners. The laws reflect crimes against them as very harsh, and crimes that they commit are usually easy with a small fine
@@ststst981 I will not agree or disagree with your points. My comment was simply made to point out who has dictated the range of "acceptable punishment" when a crime or violation has a mandatory minimum sentence/fine.
It's crazy how many artists were on the side of the record companies knowing how little money they made from sales. The ceos were literally stealing their profits.
Lars Ulrich whined and complained about royalties while remaink silent about proper pay for Dave Mustaine. I also recall someone asking him if he ever had bootleg music on a cassette tape... silence and crickets ensued
@@wolphin732 I'm thinking the very successful ones had to because the labels had the power to shut down their live performances over anything the artist said that they didn't care for.
I used to use these sites to find new music I didn’t wanna pay for , found some bands I really liked and even ended up buying merch , the albums, concert tickets , so they made their money back lmao
@Ethan Hammons As someone that works in fine arts, if a client ever tells me they can pay me less/none because of potential “exposure”, they can sod off
@@shaggy1531 You can tell by my name and profile picture that I care DEEPLY about my channel… I think you seem to care more than I do since you bothered checking ;)
They went after a 12-year-old, that like trying to sue a kid for stealing penny sweats. A firm telling off and some form of punishment might have been a better idea.
@@Kittysuit LOL. Shut up with the BS, kid was making and selling hacks/cheats. Anybody who does that regardless of age deserves to be sued. Ruining the experience for thousands of people by installing software that breaks TOS and also effects servers.
@@DaggerofTime Yeah, don't do it, but at least make the punishment fit the crime. How many of us have watched private DVDs and even VHS. Who actually took the piracy is a crime advert that seriously as a child. Even games, since the SNES, I've had almost every major title and have no issue with using emulators. I played Pilot Wings the other day on an emulator; I paid for the game at some point, well my parents did, and it has been lost over the years. So technically, it's illegal because I don't have the physical copy anymore. Cheating on games, yeah, it ruins matches, but I can't remember a time when it hasn't been like that. Take Titan Fall, for example, Respawn won't sort it out, and the second one is going the same way. Respawn isn't bothered and still selling Titan Fall One for £20 when the game is completely broken. If developers actually devoted time to anti-cheat systems, it wouldn't be such an issue. If 14-year-olds can ruin games that cost hundreds of millions to make, it is pretty poor.
From personal experience I can say the RIAA is basically a bunch of power hungry executives in fancy offices. Back in the late 2000's, one of my rodeo groups tried to pay the RIAA for the background music we planed to use at our upcoming rodeo. Over several months, we sent many e-mails, several registered letters, and left numerous phone messages. They never responded to any of our attempts to contact them. In the middle 2010s another of my rodeo groups received a legal notice to pay RIAA $20,000 for use of their music at a recent rodeo. (the total box office for that rodeo is generally only a few thousand dollars all of which is either used to rent the facility or is given to charities) This, despite the fact that the IRAA's own rules say that nonprofit events where music is simply used as background are limited to a total of $20 per event. We sent them a $20 check and never heard from them again, even though all our rodeos still use commercial music as background.
It was really scary at the time I remember I was told by my dad not to bring my mp3 full of pirated music when crossing the border so we don’t risk selling our house and filing bankruptcy. Glad there are streaming services now.
I personally helped digitize my parents' music collection from vinyl and tape, so that they wouldn't have to pay the record companies a third time for the same damn music.
Me too... I mean they had already bought it on vinyl, tape, and CD in some cases. Why pay for the same music 3-5 times each time the media format changes???
i digitized my tape collection & some family VHS videos several years back.. using an Elgato product back when they were just a lesser known brand. It's nice that i can pull up college radio mixes and such that i recorded when i was younger right on my devices.
Lmao sometimes I buy music on digital download and end up still streaming the same song because it's just more convenient in situations like if I want it to play next in queue to other songs I'm streaming that I haven't bought
Music piracy has dropped significantly because you can easily buy the individual song you want for usually a dollar and not be forced to spend $20 for an entire album filled with songs you have no interest in.
I doubt it's dropped as much as you'd think. You just don't hear about it due to the RIAA not really being able to do much if anything. Pirating is still alive and kicking. Just technology has progressed so much that's virtually impossible to track any one person down.
@teflontelefon I agree but it’s been that way since the dawn of time. At the end of the day to be specific we are all selfish to an extent. Short example. A person gets involved romantically or even marriage. They are doing so to please themselves reality they are looking out for their pleaser and comfort. The difference is if they dish out as much as they receive separates the defined selfish from self equality. At the end of the day most (not all) but most let self pleasures and comfort exceed the consideration of others pleaser and comfort. My opinion if you ever come across an individual that truly considers others happiness before themselves you might want to show the same to them cause those type of people more rare then a solar eclipse. I would gladly go through 99 selfish, self righteous, self centered, greedy, cheating, lying pieces of 💩 just to find that 1 friend/mate that will put his or her friends family and even strangers before themselves. I don’t boast by saying this but it truly is me but I wake up every morning and try to make everyone I encounter smile/laugh. No matter what my day, week or even month has been like. I may sound sensitive but that’s cause I am. At the same time I’m not one to be stepped over. It’s a balance that has to be met. The world isn’t getting any better so it’s agreeable that we make the best of the times we do have. I just realized how much I’m commenting sorry lol you just seem like you are pretty chill.
@teflontelefon Copyright laws goes aginst nature? You mean stealing goes against nature??🤔 I would like to "share information" about your credit card data so we all can enjoy it. Go away, troll. These idiots in the video were offered settlements in the range of of a few thousands of dollars, but they wanted to pull theatrics and paid for it.
I remember learning the term "rip" music from a CD to put onto my mp3 player. We would show our playlists to friends and compare how many songs we had on our players. That was an indication of how much time we spent ripping CDs, downloading from Napster, and how cool we were. Downloading and sharing files is how I discovered an whole new genre of music! In my small hick town, we had a country station, a religious station, and a classic rock station that played more disco than anything. Metal and grunge were new and exciting, and I never heard of Metallica before Napster. So there's that.
They pointed out the greatest argument against RIAA. Just because someone is downloading your music for free doesn’t mean the labels and artists were actually losing money. Most people who did it would never go out and pay for it. If you’re going to sue a lone individual for downloads and claim it cost you money, you would have to prove that person would’ve purchased the music in lieu of the piracy, and that’s impossible. Imagine paying $17 for a CD. They scammed us for years. To hell with them.
19:59 “...Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue...The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” - Gabe Newell
Gabe N is on a whole higher level intellectually than almost anybody in any other business. The existence of Half life 2 and Alyx prove that to me beyond a doubt, so does the Steam program itself, Newell is already living in 2100.
@@gavintantleff my dad downloaded films and music off Newsbin and sold it to the poorer people in my county. He was slowly losing business, so he switched to selling large bundles of movies (like over a 100 or so) for a discount. His business didn't go down till he took 4 to the chest and died about 6 years.
I was a Napster wiz and was one of the few kids at school who had a CD burner in my pc. Let’s just say that my computer was never shut off due to constant downloads and burning for classmates. Ahhh, the good days.
@@allywilkeforsenate that was a rationalization at the time. Being at a tech Uni with fast ethernet was a match made in heaven for music sharing. And a lot of people did get exposed to new groups, tried it an album before buying it, etc. I was a limer for awhile mostly looking for digital versions of music I had bought in the 80s on inferior cassette. Or things boomers and silents were sharing off old vinyl that you couldn't buy, like very early Sinatra as a young singer for a big band orchestra, not a top recording artist. More of that out there these days but I still have tracks I have never heard anywhere else.
yea the bots are bad there was a speed runner who let genius show some of his video and they slapped the original video of his with a claim lol they tried to claim his video was there because they showed a few seconds of it in there video it was a nightmare to set straight these companies that run these bots are almost as bad as paten trolls
@@Sernival hell is an allegory for misplaced intellectual capasity... and lawyers typically are pretty smart.. so actually no. hell is reserved for people who think they know everything.. but actually know jack shit.
@@whoiscodyblood Some lawyers are smart, just like any other category. They are learned. There is a difference, and any suing kids, single moms or homeless people (or college kids) deserve to burn.
“The handful of gatekeepers who controlled what got played on the radio” hasn’t this part actually gotten worse over the last 20 years? Every radio station in the entire USA is owned by fucking Clear Channel and plays the same 10 songs
The thing is the radio doesn't matter or control the music industry at this point. Front page of spotify or apple music (shit even being a tiktok trend) trumps any amount of radio play a song will get.
I was one of those students. I got sued for a huge amount of money, but settled for a few hundred. As a broke college student, that seemed horrible but I actually don't remember that I ever actually paid. The judgement is nearly twenty years old now, so I'm not too worried.
I for one was tired of having to shell out my hard earned money to buy a CD that had maybe one song I liked. When I later found out that a tiny fraction of my money went to the artist, I stopped paying for music. THAT is the fault of the greedy RIAA.
so you didn't like their business model of "one good song and the rest filler"? Must be your fault music's trash. Oh wait, it's probably the music companies really
Congrats. As a musicologist, semi-pro musician, die-hard music lover from classical music to rock, I lived through all this. And I think I can form a professional opinion. I think you nailed it, and reported as objectively as possible.
Metallica said in an interview they grew up as teens sharing tapes of albums they didn't have to broaden their music listening and how amazing it was getting new bands on a cassette from a friend,,, decades late they call Napster thieves., this is why Metallica sucks, amongst other reasons..
The thing is usually everyone did Tape trading when the grew up in a certain time. Especially in the Metal scene some of my older friends had in the times before the internet friends in many countrys and where sending out the best stuff weekly and got the same amount of stuff back.
@@mrn234 I know so did I growing up , but its still copyright infringement , whether its taping and sharring a cassette or downloading and sharing, but Metallica seems to think cassettes are different that the internet,. the hypocrisy is deafening,
I hear you but there's a difference between taping a few mate's albums, then maybe buying stuff yourself if you get into artists, vs wholesale ripping anything & everything because it's literally all $nada being your ethos, and then distributing it all like it's oxygen. I DJ out as an amateur and always pay for every f download so I can in some way support artists (apart from 4 or 5 remixes I'm "not allowed" to buy legally in my "territory" because some licensing BS). I'm amongst dj's who clearly rip their sht for free and make a living from it, as their downloads are BS quality. But then nobody in an audience gives a f. about quality from a bad sound system, so who really cares? I despair for the artists and dj producers :-(
@@mrl4342 these people got done for a minimal amount of downloads .. not thousands, plus if you download one album your still breaking the law , if you tape one album and distribute it your still breaking the law, copyright is copyright, you cant argue the law. thats my point its hypocrisy to nail one person for downloading 3 albums and yet we all say we did it in our youths and its different. I work full time in the music industry and have dealt with copyright lawyers over an advertising jingle . I know the struggle as a musician to get paid so I dont condone ripping anyone ,but if you dont buy an artists album because you were given a cassette copy, or a usb copy or you found it online and downloaded for free the artist misses out on that sale , period.
The music industry in my humble opinion is killing themselves. They no longer allow TH-cam creators to push their fun music and their videos for copyright claim and so no one ever hears about certain songs that people would then go and listen to
What's really crazy when the song is made in America just like with our movies and they say not available in your country you wouldn't have it if it were for the usa that you hate some of you from another country who hate our country. That's youtube for ya they do nothing to protect anyone but themselves. What can you expect out of california. Crestons wife speaking
I listen to Harry Mack, coke lam, the great Leon, from blue to Greene, Marcus Veltri, blind fury and all the other independent TH-cam musicians who upload regularly without any record deal. Tom McDonald is another one that’s been getting a lot of attention
I think we owe a lot to her. I wonder where she is now. We need a large mural of her painted on the buildings of Los Angeles. Haha jk. Really though, we do owe her a lot. Perhaps she will see this comment and reply.
It's crazy that these people want tobe paid for something they love to do. It's all bogus man. Napster was freedom for the Masses to rightfully enjoy the music of their choice... free from the constraints of the man. It's also odd but my sister, who is pretty hot really if I'm just being honest, like music too. Music is free for the people.
agreed... but i also am kinda sad that it feels like we are glossing over many years of evolution in the music industry too.. I lived with my tape cassettes and CDs for a long long while.
@@Мөнхдөл I have pirated before, it is just I really like steam and it is often free of things in other industries that annoy me about their business practices and how they treat their users so I would be more likely to save up for steam than I would be for other media
For real.. for a long time I would download pirated movies and tv shows because it was ridiculously expensive to have to buy all the cable packages just to get the one with, say AMC so I could watch walking dead. When services like Netflix became affordable and easy to use I completely stopped downloading because the frustration of downloading good versions finally outweighed the cost of the legitimate service.
@@Мөнхдөл a "lost sale" to a "customer" that has "no money" in the first place, is not the "lost revenue in sales" that content "creators" can reasonably ask for compensation in the law suit.
This reminds of the story of the schoolgirl who was illegally downloading music and video off of the Internet and was punished by her father, who is a judge. She was ready with a webcam when her father came into her bedroom to punish her again for a repeat offense. The daughter released the video of her beating online.
The true heroes in this story are the lawyers. They worked pro bono for years. Sure they had the money to do it and it was great publicity for their law companies. But they helped these people when they needed them the most.
LOL.... Yes those people who didn't have 2 million dollars NEEDED help... -_- smfh, if you don't have 2 million you can't be sued for your soul... you just never pay, and never care to.
@@Enders I'm not quite sure what you mean. Personal bankruptcy isn't a joke either way. Sure, you'll never pay, but it follows you your whole life. Not to mention the stress of legal battles is never easy.
One interesting factor was in the 90's record labels colluded to more or less kill or suppress singles sales. If you wanted to own an individual song you needed to buy the album. This jacked up album sales higher than they'd ever been (as mentioned). But this also created a feeling among the fans they were getting ripped off.
Singles in CD were still available but only for a few albums. But it didn't matter. I remember a single costing like 6 dollars. Freaking insane. They still had singles but priced it so it would never make sense to buy it.
@@theelite1x721987 I see, makes sense if that was their strategy. Singles were not banned as such, they were just not promoted, marketed or priced in the way they had been.
meanwhile, in japan, cd sales are still strong because you can't pirate concert tickets, handshake tickets, and any event perks bundled with the physical copy. Some fans of a well-known idol group purchase multiple copies just to get multiple event tickets. The bundled items and perks became far more valuable than the copy of the music itself.
They are also very good at only sell some exclusive discs at some physical event that cannot be bought anywhere else People cannot pirate a song when there's like only 100 copies scattered half-accross the globe from them--Cutting oversea fans potential chance to buy one for themselves in the process.
It might lead to strong sales, but it's definitely not healthy for the overall industry. Japan is great at extracting as much disposable income from really small groups of really dedicated fans. It's basically what mobile games do these days. Instead of charging 99 cents per player, they want players putting their entire life savings into "microtransactions". This will never be a healthy business model for anyone involved.
Not disputing what you're saying, but out here, the Japanese are easy to frighten with regulations/rules. If an authoritative body says "Don't do that" then a vast majority of them won't do it. I notice many Spotify users out here and even that, I think, took longer to catch on. It's also surprising how slow they move with the times. It took smartphones a lot longer to catch on out here than it did in other countries. (Not exactly related, but I was in an electronics department store last week and I saw a wall of portable CD players for sale. A few years ago, they were still selling VHS tapes lol).
I remember back in the 2000s when I thought people should have the right to upload, download, and overall listen to the music they want online without consequences. My brother called me a "communist" and my mother agreed and badmouthed me. Ironically, he pirated nearly every NES, SNES, and Genesis game on his computer. And my mother is a hardcore conspiracy theory nut now.
That was a trip down memory lane! When I was 15 in 05' I got sued (technically my single mom) for copyright infringement. $22,500,000.00! I forgot to "not share" on lime wire. So I was sharing like 3-4000 songs. We ended up settling for $4000.00 plus another 4k in attorney fees. I eventually paid my mom back after 4 years.
@@Moonlightshadow-lq4fr Hell I started from a 14.4 dial up modem, do you know how fast that thing was and when the faster modem were released do you know how much them thing cost...? Forget the sharing.....
Exactly. Because bands hardly even make their money from record sales. All their real money comes from live shows. So pirating literally does nothing to hurt them. And so I'll continue doing as I please. Soulseek is the shit.
the funny thing is that for myself and most of my friends, we actually bought music based on something we heard for free. Ultimately, the "free" music was our gateway to new artists and bands we would never had heard on the radio. And this is the ultimate comedy in all of this. What the RIAA was really trying to protect was the monopoly they held over us through terrestrial radio. The radio network is where the real effect was. They no longer control our ability to hear new bands, artists and songs like they did in previous decades. And that is a good thing.
The Japanese music industry is the most ridiculously hardass about this, and has never even warmed up to any kind of digital distribution. Consequently only members of freakishly esoteric communities in the U.S. (which makes up about half of the world's music market) are aware that Japan has ever produced music.
Radio and stores. Back during the time this story took place, it was very hard for an independent label to get their CDs into record stores - and quite ridiculous to even think of getting them into the big chain stores like Walmart where the big money was. You needed connections, volume manufacture, and a huge marketing budget for that. There was really no music industry outside of the RIAA or their various national counterparts.
I’ve purchased a lot of vinyl records on artists’ Bandcamp pages from their songs I heard on streaming. Yeah, Spotify is a shitty company and artists should make way more money per play, but I’ve discovered so many tiny bands I’d never even hear if it weren’t for streaming. It’s cool to actually buy their stuff and know they get a significant cut.
@@Helicopterpilot16 i wonder if an acapella cover would get a strike as well? that would be proof that their tech is getting better but their common sense is getting farther.
@@donloder1 I believe so, especially if they used the artists original instrumentals. It's literally ruined part of what it means to be a creator. Of course someone who uses background music isn't claiming to own the rights. Instead we get that cancerous EDM bleep blow shit that pings into my ears. Reminds me of the old 009 sound system. Their copyright rules made TH-cam vanilla.
The aim was never to get the money. It was to make an example of them. Pick a few pirates, make a very public show of ruining their lives, and then hold that up as a deterrent. "Are you pirating music? Then you might be next."
@@blueberryjelly9815 I have 6 hard drives around 500GB each, but now I just stream 4K rips to my shield TV Pro with real debrid. So I stream 80GB files with ease as I have gigabit speed. So my drives sit collecting dust these days.
Metallica may not have been been "responsible" but Lars was the face of the Anti-Napster/File sharing movement. He was carting around print outs of user names. Southpark made an episode of it. Showed him crying because he could only afford one gold toilet. XD
Lol, the Napster days. I remember bragging to a friend of mine around 1999 "My work computer has such a good internet connection that I can download a 3MB song from Napster in 30-60 seconds."
I can remember when you had to download songs in parts, often 10. So 1/10, 2/10, 3/10,.... Each part would take about 10 minutes to download, and then you had to have a specific piece of software to put the parts together. Downloading an album was a full day job.
everyone on those jurys are scumbags for not choosing $750 per song. but piracy was new at the time and most of the jury would have been too old to understand since they don't select teenagers for jury duty
it all goes to the instructions from the judge the jury receives and the fact they jury is never under any circumstances informed of their constitutional right to jury nullification...............the fact is jury's are not actually bound by the judges instructions and always have the right to ignore those instructions and vote their mind...........................if you disagree with a law or its application as a jury member you have the legal right to ignore them .
I'm 41, i lived through it all. I had a couple thousand songs downloaded from Limewire. I bought very few albums after say 2000. But i've had Spotify for years now and happily pay $10 a month because finding, downloading, uploading, sorting and renaming MP3's was a huge P.I.T.A! Thank god for streaming services.
@@inab9779 You're choice. Here in Australia it's $11.99aud (about $9usd) a month. It's not much to someone like me for the ability to play exactly what i want when i want. It's about choice.
I’m 39 and remember it like it was yesterday. Bearshare was another good platform. But a big problem you were having with using these sites was that some files contained viruses, malware, or spyware. Yes, now I happily pay the subscriptions. I even pay for TH-cam premium because the time it saves me not having to listen to ads makes it well worth the cost.
I love when the CEO's of these record labels pretend they care about the rights of the artists on their labels..
Imagine selling an album for 30$ and giving 50 cents to the artist
@@IDC45 Well, It depends on the profit of live concerts, merch and other profits. Not every band or artist only get 50 cent from 30$ album.
@@ranjanbiswas3233 No not every one just most of them except the top 0.5%. The industry brought it on themselves. The artists who moved to the web proved that they did not need the greedy companies.
record labels do be looking kinda SUS.
Yeah they convinced the artist this would be bad when the internet ended up giving them the creative freedom they wanted. Artists don’t need labels anymore.
I think the music industry solved the piracy problem in a most unique way in the end. Make music so terrible that nobody would ever bother downloading it.
Hahahaha *starts crying*
There’s great music still being made, but you have to spend an awful lot of time looking for it. Of course it’s true that there is a lot of would-be artists put off pursuing a career in music since there’s no money in it. Only the top 1% make any money these days.
@@enigmatwist6548 Best to go the Spark Master Tape route. Stay anonymous, stay independent, and build a loyal following from the ground up. Platoon gon' rise. #swoup
Especially the rap genre. What garbage.
Truthfully, I parallel this to what's happening in other mediums like comics right now. Marvel & DC have seen huge declines in sales and seemingly endless amounts of outrage from fans that are salty about what the big 2 have been doing for years now. At the same time independent sales have never been better. Likewise in the music industry, artists have vastly more resources to take matters into their own hands than before to at least make a decent living off of their work, even if they never reach super stardom. Which pretty much leaves the naive and the industry plants left in what used to be considered the "mainstream." Ultimately what this means is that it's not a downgrade in quality, but rather a shift in platform for the artists, and fans can't expect to be spoon fed anymore.... you actually have to do a bit of leg work for once. But with suggestion algorithms, it's not all that difficult to find things you like, especially on TH-cam. lol
"Now that Napster is shut down, the labels can go back to being the ones screwing over artists". - John Stewart
Don't forget Spotify
Based
You mean yet another subversive progressive *Jewish* "comedian." Just a coincidence I'm sure.
@@hawhafunnyraffs5568 everytime
*Jon
A friend of mine was working for one of the record companies during part of this period doing royalty "clearance". The record company formula deducted all kinds of charges against sales before calculating the profit that they gave a small percentage of to the artists. One charge was for a percentage of "breakage" going back to the older, brittle phonograph records, but still charged, even against CDs. There also was that they frequently just kept the royalties in an account that were owed to lesser known artists that they didn't have contact information for and couldn't be bothered to try to find. Composers, arrangers and performers often got checks for less than $10.00 when tens of thousands of recordings had been sold. But, the RIAA insisted that the artists were the victims of piracy, when in reality the thievery was being done by the record companies, the agents and the lawyers.
THAT is a BRILLIANT analysis that never occurred to me. Why spend millions on pointless lawsuits unless it is all an act to distract from the real thievery? Makes perfect sense.
There have been cases where the company's agreement with the artist timed out but the record company kept selling the music. They never sued themselves though.
this is exactly why music piracy is and will always be popular. and i support it 100%
EXACTLY.....A con job for the Record companies to ROB legit artists and blame piracy 🤣😂
Classic capitalism~
Fun fact since Napster became a legal streaming service they pay their artist more than spotify ironic.
Yeah didn’t they merge with rhapsody?
@@lilyteeth yeah bandcamp is basically the itch.io ot music whereas spotify is more like steam
@@jlewwis1995 whats itch.io?
@@girishkumarpeddi6266 An infection of the bottoms of human feet and toes. Can be cured with a special medical cream.
@@jlewwis1995 steam keeps around 30% as publisher's fee IIRC. Spotify is far more greedy than that.
It showed the true colors of "artists" like metallica, kiss, Dr Dr, et al who sold the image of being a rebel and fighting the man, but in reality were the man.
ie every popular artist ever. You don't get to the top of billboards and become cultural phenomenon, just selling mixtaps from the back of your trunk/underground. Takes the whole apparatus of entertainment industry, to go from just another "super talented" artist to a cultural icon.
Well… no one joins the music industry without a desire to make money from it.
Who're the last two?
@@maxborn7400 Tom Macdonald has been able to do it. th-cam.com/video/fCMwlorNEZk/w-d-xo.html
@@maxborn7400 Well, there's one rapper in my home country that already is a cultural phenomenon and everybody knows him here. Yet whenever he drops a new album (and that usually happens every summer) he makes it available to download in mp3 for free from his website. In the same time he's never been advertising anything and I don't recall any interview with him. Yet he makes good buck simply by being able to sell out a concert hosted on a biggest stadium in the country.
I think it's fucking hilarious that record labels call downloaders pirates when they in fact take such a big share of artist's money without having to do shit for it.
Record labels do invest a few million dollars on an artists. Lots of them fail. That's why they're paid like crap
@@JR-xn6yu I personally think it's ridiculous that a good deal share wise is 50/50. I am lucky that I signed for a contract that has a 60% for the artists and 40% for the label. It's kind of like how steam takes so much of the share of the sale of a game. They are not doing much, but they can charge so much because they have the power to do so.
@@Jalmaan If you think about it Steam does a lot without doing much. Steam is just a great hub for games on computer. What they did was create a platform that everyone turns to because of availability, reliability, simplicity. One way to see how their doing is by looking at the direct competition. Which Steam doesn't really have, rather multiple launchers that wish people would look at them like Steam. Like look at epic games for example, they give out so many free games for the hopes of getting near steam. Steam is like the Google of launchers.
@@bigbosslive69 yea, which is why i like what the epic games store stands for, just don't like their execution in how it's done. Steam really needs to up their revenue share so devs can get more. Would be so much better for the industry
@@Jalmaan I don't know much about Steam revenue shares but really the only reason people would be there is for the amazing games that these devs produce. So I also agree people should get paid for their hard work in any field. It's just another thing to look at with these powerhouse company's, because they can really do what they want without a direct competitor.
This unlocked memories of my grandmother yelling, “you better not be stealing music & get me sued” to me & my cousins when we went over to use her computer. I miss that lady😢
Love it
Who else read that using an old grandma's voice?
hahahahaaa
yep!@@sbalogh53
Streaming companys are now stealing not just from us but from actors and musicians to crazy how time changes yo
As an ex signed guitarist I will tell you in the mid 2010’s we realized as touring artists that we’d rather kids got our music for free and show up to our shows and buy merch than them never getting ahold of the music at all. That was quite the revelation back then.
I was in an after school music group with my daughter at her school and the teacher was always talking about copyright infringement and such things as he knew musicians that were getting royalties from playing on some hit TV show.
Then one Sunday at my church they played some older hymns out of a book and I heard a tune that was very familiar sounding even though it was very old.
I found out it was a section of a piece of music we were playing in our music group from a tune that was SUPPOSED to be only a few years old.
Hmm. I wonder where that came from?
The Japanese music industry is the most ridiculously hardass about this, and has never even warmed up to any kind of digital distribution. Consequently only members of freakishly esoteric communities in the U.S. (which makes up about half of the world's music market) are aware that Japan has ever made music. Meanwhile the Koreans have gotten to #1 in the U.S. by putting 4K quality videos on YT and pushing them to get millions of views and a dozen K-pop acts are touring the U.S. right now.
@@I_Have_The_Most_Japanese_Music The Japanese are absurdly stringent about digital distribution and image licensing. Sega almost killed a blooming game franchise because they couldn' iron out the image and voice licensing of the main character - who was a boy band singer if I'm not mistaken.
That's awesome, wish more saw it like that!
We went into touring with that mindset. But by the time we were booking Big tours and crossing the country, the music industry had gone to shit. I had become "You fit the bill, you go broke touring, your go broke for studio time, and then if you're successful, we wanna sign you" Then the icing in the cake is the offers you get require you to provide said company with at least 3 albums and you can't do your own thing in between them. We did all the left work, and once we had offers we all quit.
The real thieves here are the record companies who pay the artists only 50 freakin cents(!) for every $20 CD they sold.
yes.
Sounds bad and there are greedy scumbags out there. But imagine someone honest being a label. Say they're paying for everything up-front. It's a risk. If you liked a band would you gamble $300k on what sell zero? Music videos made no money for anyone except MTV who kept all the ad revenue. The videos were at times million dollar commercials for the music. Artists made most from radio royalties and touring. 50c a cd is low, but if it was 50/50 and a video was $200k, the artist might not be able to drop $100k, so the label gets more equity since they bear more risk. Studio time, session players, producers, engineers and other marketing add up too. David Byrne's book on music has a great breakdown of costs as an indie artist.
@@BenWeeks I actually knew an artist in high school. She wrote her own music and had to pay the costs up front. So there are cases of artists eating the costs. And even when the company covers those costs, it makes more sense to do that to an unknown.
Why do you think so many big names end up making their own record company? Because even if there is no risk they will still only be paid pennies.
The standard contract with any artist for streaming is even worse, and the costs for the company is even lower. Pandora, for example, pays an artist pennies and there's np up front cost making this a CDs. Instead, the infrastructure cost is the same no matter who it is and of no one likes the music they will just press the skip button and the artist won't be paid at all anyway.
Depends on the company/artist. most of the ultra popular artists don't even write their own music, they have ghostwriters doing that, they are basically just "mascots".
Don't sign the contract then
Hi. Thanks for this video. I can confirm as a primary source that I did file for bankruptcy and the RIAA never got a dime. It’s nice to see a retrospective like this showing that the people who fought back were found on the right side of history, that scaring people into an antiquated business model was never going to work.
stealing art is nothing to be proud of.
@@tomektalk4671 LOL "stealing art". Yeah dude, George Clooney and Matt Damon were involved. There was a laser security system and everything.
@@joeltenenbaum7662 good for you for sticking up for yourself and ‘the little guy’ for so many years. Absolute legend, glad they never got a cent from you.
Thank you for paving the way for means like Spotify so we can now have infinite music without having to steal it or worry about what you went through lol
@@joeltenenbaum7662 you’re the true hero fr
I think it’s not fully understood by a lot of people how severely the RIAA going after regular people for millions of dollars damaged the music industry’s reputation for decades.
Not to mention that most artists weren't behind them since they practically never saw a dime of record sales, aside from some exceptions. The secondary effect of a lot of people downloading music and discovering artists and then going to see them live is also understated.
you mean the reputations of ALL the scumbags and assholes that spent decades fucking over artists and consumers alike?.... Yeah, it's going to be tough to regain that sort of admiration.
What really angered me was when I couldn't legally make a CD from a (largely obsolete) cassette tape of music for my elderly father -- music he had BOUGHT with the record label on it, etc.
The music industry wasn't interested in fair use or dealing fairly with changing (and rapidly obsoleting) electronic media -- but ONLY with making as much money as possible. Period.
I remember stating that I would never feel sorry for them again re piracy.
For a couple decades, I deliberately bought a lot less CD's, as a matter of principle.
Ironically, in modern times, I'll buy a physical CD if it's cheaper than the MP3 equivalent, and have a nice physical backup.
But otherwise, I just buy the MP3 collection, and make very sure I keep my entire MP3 collection backed up independently to multiple sources. (Luckily, large flash drives of decent speed have gotten quite cheap). Even smallish SSD's.
Why the hell would you buy music? It's free on TH-cam with AdBlock, and you can just torrent everything
I fully agree, i still cant stand alot of the artists who spoke out against it back then, reminds me of current times and how people are treating AI
I remember when Radiohead self released their album on the internet cutting the label completely out of the process.. It was relatively epic.
so 5 years ago? everyone remembers it
@Lox Prince I love his music I'm glad you brought that up
@@InfiniteRhombus It was 14 years ago.
@@InfiniteRhombus time goes by quick huh? That was in 2007 bud.
@@Yphrum so 80 years ago
Funniest thing happened early this year Metallica tried to live stream a concert on Twitch and it got hit with a DMCA and had random non copyright music played over it.
I’d like to invent some technology to blur an image every time Lars Ulrich appeared so I don’t have to see his smug face.
@@theseoldbeats For now you can watch 'Lars Funhaus compilation' on TH-cam
😂 💯 👍
what goes around comes around I guess
Say what you want about Lars but without him metallica would've gone nowhere
“It’s a very dangerous machine” translation “I can’t make money off of abusive contracts and I’m scared”
Make their artists work like slaves while they sit on their lazy asses and get 90% of the Profits..
My thoughts exactly! :) A very dangerous machine that might prevent me from ripping you off while leeching of artists with actual talent.
@Liam AOC worked her way thru college and Obama had the inherent disadvantage of being black so right off the bat that part is horseshit
and the fact that *any computer* does it anyways… he's referring to _copying files_
Not to mention, all of the skeevy scummy "casting couch" stuff these execs were doing to young girls to get their albums propped up.
The Napster affair made me realize how badly the record industry was screwing us over. Most albums only have 1 or 2 good songs on them, but we are forced to buy entire album of crap just to get those few songs that we want.
Or you can listen to the mindless droning on the radio.
No way that's so untrue. Lots of excellent 60,70,80s, 90s albums have lots of excellent songs on them. It's something you young wants won't ever know.
@@thedappercook yeah... the "greatest hits" compilations maybe.
@@themonsterunderyourbed9408 oh man I'm so sorry you didn't get to experience whole albums of magic. They're still out there, tonnes and tonnes of great albums end to end, lots of shit too of course but the initial statement/comment made couldn't be further from wrong.
Which is an example of how SOME things really do get better. It's easy to buy one good song now for a buck or so, legally, as an MP3.
Re the one or two good songs per album, it very much depends on the group, IMO.
The best groups, it's near 100 percent songs I like. Many groups I like, it's roughly half.
But yeah, for many others, to buy the greatest hits album and get 20 or so songs, of which ONE you wanted to listen to, that was a huge rip-off, so I tended to just do without owning it.
When this happened, I never purchased any music moving forward. None. Their greed was disgusting.
A lot of people saying the same thing, and honestly I got real educated on BitTorrent pretty soon after that period of itme
Same here. Especially the outright lies. Claiming that anyone who downloaded a song would've bought it otherwise.
That's like someone handing out free samples of gouda from a wheel of cheese they bought only to get sued by the gouda factory because everyone who had a bite of that cheese would've bought a wheel if they hadn't had that free sample.
@Tomjo5 During the height of the anti-piracy craze, the record labels went after anyone who was file-sharing and claimed that every IP connected to them downloading a song equalled to the theft of one album.
People were getting 5 to 6 digit fines. They knew full well that most of the people downloading those songs were teens that wouldn't have had the money to buy remotely that many albums. They just inflated the numbers so they could shake people down for more money.
@Tomjo5 I buy meat and invite you to a BBQ at my place...then the butcher knocks at your door, demanding you to pay for that meat...again...
If I reverse that thinking...having the ability to procreate as a male, makes me entitled to state child funding...cuz I could in theory have children...so pay up, state!
Same here.
All of this happened because they didn't have NORD VPN back then
😂
Tails OS
LMAOAO
@@informitas0117 Nah we're pirating music not ordering hits here...
i cant believe people are stupid enough to believe that your ISP cant see the shit thats going through their network just cause its "encrypted" like literally all web traffic. SPOILER : netflix will permaban your account if you use a VPN to illegally access shit not allowed currently in your country.
10:25 a multi millionaire sueing a single mom that's native American is pretty low. She should have countersued them for spying on her hard drive breaking privacy laws.
Everytime I’m in traffic at a red light and hear Metallica coming from someone’s vehicle, I mail Lars Ulrich a few bucks so I won’t get sued for listening for free.
hahahaha
wtf ahhaha
Well we can listen to songs on the radio I was poor growing up so I saved to get a tape deck stereo and a brick of tape and recorded songs on the radio. So was I illegally copying music cause I wasnt buying it????
@@josephcontreras8930 Yes, that would have been illegal but not immoral. So don't worry about it.
I've never forgiven that creep for Napster..
Limewire did FAR more damage to my PC downloading music illegally than I ever did to the music industry.
For real, I think back then I was re-installing windows weekly because of it.
You didn't have anti Spyware back then? Lol
🤣🤣🤣
@@Omegaxtreme bro there was a blue gorilla on my pc. Thats all the protection I need
@@gabrielmedeiros6886 haha
I was in college during that period, and my Music History professor correctly predicted the industry should embrace downloading and that it actually would help artists get free exposure.
The music industry doesn't care about artists.
Yes free exposure.
Yeah anyone with a brain was saying that
Exactly, any one who pirates isn't going to purchase anyways. So there is 0 loss. Piraters are future customers.
You know who pirates, kids and broke college kids who don't have money. Once they get a job they are the ones actually buying the games on steam and subscribing to spotify and itunes.
@@itisWhatitis12345 this is my 5th year as an HR Recruiter but I still pirate music and movies lol. I don't subscribe to spotify and itunes haha.
That woman was tough. All the way down to practically all you have to do is make a video for us and she still held her ground. Good for her.
Yup. I worked with a woman who wore a pin that said "Piss me off, and pay the consequences".
I remember her slamming her office door on some jerk, and the sonic boom sound that resulted, and picturing, comic book style, the entire large 3 story office building crumbling to dust as her office, closed door intact, stood undamaged...
That didn't happen of course, but as her number 2, I told the jerk that NO ONE on MY team (I was the team leader, she was the brains of the outfit) was going to help him AT ALL until he apologized to her and meant it.
That was a very satisfying day at work.
But yeah, piss the wrong woman off and she justifiably goes fists up -- and good luck winning THAT.
She should of been honest about the download though, that's what left a sour taste in the jury mouth. Though I think they were set up to be honest. For those wondering, I don't cuc to the RIAA, I sail the seven seas
After what they did to her, and school children for downloading a few songs, and the countless artists under them who gave them the rights over their art, I wouldn't have given them anything at all. Bankruptcy is a small price to pay for integrity and the satisfaction to what was coming to these criminals --the *real* criminals.
And to think the new "legal" streaming actually gives so little money to artists it's effectively piracy on their end
they realised what was happening and monetised it. I think it's hilarious that we don't use ipods anymore and pay to use Spotify. we are literally just paying them to download it for us. because that's the only hassle Spotify takes from you is having to download a song and put it on your phone. which you still could do for free if you wanted to
@@rastas_4221 it would've missed the point anyway
@@Brandon-cv9uh yeah but being able to pull up any song (not literal of course) that someone around u might wanna hear instantly is cool and no matter how big ur hard drive is u cant hold enough for all tastes
ya screw streaming
Musicians make more off merch and shows depending if they got in a 360 or not
Greed played a big role in this. In the pre-digital age records were fairly affordable. When CDs came out the industry promised us that prices would drop as they ramped up production. It did not. Prices remained about 2 to 3 times the price of a vinyl record at that time. People wanted affordable music. The internet only made that easier to get.
exactly! they priced them selves out of the market and to top it off they took a ludicrously high cut and left the actual talent with a tiny fraction of a %.
What, you mean paying $16 ($24 adjusted for inflation since 2001) for only 2-4 good songs on an album with the rest filler garbage was overpriced?
Nooooo.
Yep. CDs also cost a fraction of the price to manufacture compared to vinyl and cassettes.
Ironic that today I buy used CDs for $1 or maybe $2.
Yep, that’s pretty much the size of it. Cassettes never increased in price, but as vinyl was phased out it became more expensive until it was removed altogether (at least this was the case in the UK). Once that happened, CDs just got more expensive. Small wonder people resorted to copying music.
“Did the record labels ever get their money?”
I sure hope not
My response was, no. Of course not...
@@dread-cthulu There was no money to get. If a car is stolen from you, and you wake up finding the exact same car there, as if it were a copy, would you feel robbed?
Supposedly it was brought about to protect the artist. But no artist ever received any money.
*other people's money, and they already had it and just wanted more
Why would anybody go to work, and then give away their product for free, and get zero hourly wage payment? You? Musicians making music is their job, record companies are their employers. Are you really this dumb? I already know you are, just by your statement.
The sad part is, these people the RIAA decided to make examples out of were probably nothing compared to what my neighbor was supposedly doing. During the file sharing era, he bought himself a CD burner and would make CDs with any songs you wanted for a flat fee, $5 or something. Never got caught.
You have crooks on Etsy doing this same shit today with cassette tapes. They claim they are selling their personal artwork as a tape label and the music is free.
Exactly
i hada 2x burner i think, it sucked when a disc failed lol. 1 hr burn was rough
Man everyone was doing this. I didn’t know a single person who didn’t have a bunch of burnt CDs in their car. It got to the point where every single soul had limewire, we all knew how to burn cd-r’s by the time we were teenagers, and it’s crazy they outed these 2 people when I personally knew 50+ people within a 5 miles radius lol
Imagine if people starting coming out saying they all pirated until the IRAA wasn't able to even pursue legal action. They would have bankrupted themselves.
I am Sparta- I mean, I am Napster!
In a way, they did. They knew everyone was downloading music. They couldn't really do anything.
The RIAA knew that 'pirating' was widespread. Their strategy was to make examples of a small number to frighten the rest into stopping.
Same if EVERYONE stopped paying their mortgages, what could the banks do? Foreclose on the mortgage and put it on the market to get bought by another person that wouldn't pay the mortgage? Also taking them ALL to court wouldn't work as the courts wouldn't have the time to hear all the cases.
@@TheFalconerNZ The novel "Fight Club" made a similar proposal. If a worldwide 3 day strike took place, wealth would surely be redistributed.
I cannot imagine being on a jury and handing out a $220K verdict for sharing 24 songs to anyone.
that wasnt a jury of her peers it was probably a jury full of recording industry insiders
Imagine a bunch of then-middle aged boomers who barely know how to use a computer.
@@BlueSatoshi Sure. But it couldn't be that hard to equate it to giving away bootleg CDs for free. I can't imagine anyone decent choosing to charge tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per song. I mean I can believe it because it happened, but it's really very disturbing. Corporate propaganda is incredibly powerful.
Jury nullification is a thing, but even attempting to rule it is contempt. The courts are screwed and need new judges that understand the internet
@@RandyRandersonthefamous Jury nullification is a right.
When you pirate music... you're stealing from the record company because they get 99% of the money anyway, not the artist. The artists make their money from merch and concert tickets. Fuck the industry. If you want to support a band, acquire their music however you want, and then donate them money directly on patreon/etc.
Agrre but now with the virus going on there is no concerts going on.unless they do live shows online.
Piracy is not theft, it's copyright infringement. Stop repeating the lie.
@@markusr353 Which is a form of theft.
@@markusr353 you are correct,
if i go into a museum that hosts a super big diamond and I duplicate it using a high tech duplication ray gun. And i put the duplicate my room.
Did i steal it?
@@markusr353 Define Piracy without using a synonym of the word theft. I'll wait.
I love that the RIAA probably spent more in legal fees than they got out of suing private individuals.
thats exactly why they stopped doing it
You know why pirating took off?
CD’s cost $18, only had one or two good songs on them and if you got a scratch on it you were buying the whole damn thing again.
It wasn’t uncommon to buy the same CD two or three times just from damage especially if you were sliding it in and out of a CD carrier.
The argument that people were downloading music they already owned was probably truer than you might assume.
I never forgave them for the Power Rangers movie soundtrack costing that much. Teens can not often afford that when they have to go to school.
How were you handling CDs that you had multiple or common instances where you bought more than one copy because of damage? I graduated college in 94, so was right there during the CD boom, and I've never damaged any of my CDs to the point that I had to buy another one. Price-wise, yeah, they were expensive, which is why those mail-order 99 cent CD companies were so popular.
My CD still work lol
Some come with track writing glitches on them even, so they start out broken. Had that happen a few times at least.
@Blitzen RC That would kind of be the "how do you handle CDs" part of my question. Why would you have a bunch of CDs sliding around on the backseat of a car? I always had my CDs in those protective books that held 100 or 200 CDs.
Also around 2003 the RIAA started flooding the file sharing networks with fake and corrupted copies of popular music. At first the fakes were too short in length and too small in file size to be the real thing, making them easy to avoid, but then they started uploading files that appeared to be the correct length and size, but when you downloaded them, they would play for about 30 seconds and then start making loud screeching noises. This drove away many users, because it often became nearly impossible to find legitimate copies of popular songs among all the fakes.
And meanwhile, the record companies started putting out "copy protected" CDs that could not be played on a computer without installing special software that would limit your ability to make copies of the CD, and would actually install a rootkit virus on your computer. Sony Music was the biggest proponent of this system, and after a class-action lawsuit was filed, they stopped making copy-protected CDs, released software to remove the virus, and offered to recall and replace the copy-protected CDs with regular, non-protected CDs.
Appreciate the knowledge
Oh ok
Bs corporation that sue people for just zero beneficial at all.
That Sony virus actually killed some pcs
VWestlife dropping some knowledge! Surprised to see you in a comment section!
I remember the panic in everybody’s face when the police came on a bi-monthly basis to our college dorm to check if we were stealing music. 1996-99 was just a different time
"Show us your downloads now!"
*nervously opens downloads folder revealing your Neopet hacking program you made to make your Poogle OP*
How the hell would they do that? "Police. Open the door!", "Do you have a warrant?", "eh,,no." "Feel free to fuck off then."
@@nicolasmogensen8727 yeah but this was in South Africa not America
Did they really have nothing better to do? Couldn't they be out stopping real crimes and beating up minorities? You know police stuff
@@atlascheethac7869 oh shit I'm also south African but I'm young I didn't know it was a thing back then because now no one cares. I also heard alot of artists where banned under apartheid.
RIAA: we are here to protect artists.
CD costs 75 cents to produce, artist makes 50 cents per cd, company sells cd for $17 making $15.75 profit. Remind us again RIAA who the thieves are🤔
And the artists defend them...
Then artists don't have to make deals with record companies. But they do, because companies provide them with marketing and exposure. It's not pure profit.
Closer to 25 cents. I remember an idiot Congressman complaining that CDs were all printed in South Korea, wanted the jobs back in the US. The printing companies were making a fraction of a cent profit per CD. The international shipping cost was inexpensive too. Almost all the $17 price tag was split between the retailers and the record labels, with a small percent to the artists. The reason CD sales collapsed was because most CDs only had one song anyone wanted to listen too. $17 a song vs $1 on iTunes was what killed CDs. Albums that had multiple good songs were the big sellers of CDs in the 80s and 90s because the price per good song fell. An interesting result of the $1 song has been the trend in artists touring instead of pumping out studio albums. The artists tend to earn their living from live performances these days, instead of from album sales. So it has been a great era for live music.
Aye Aye! This is FACT. Artists protected their only "middle man" as it was their only source of revenue. Nowadays they can sell their work directly for a smaller price and get way more money without those middle man recording / retailer companies. Not to say I dont support music stores, after all there's plenty of peoplo who collect CDs and Vinyl still.
@@Dudemon-1 Marketing? If you like shitty corporate bands. I get all my band info from Spotify, YT, and interweb word of mouth.
As someone who recorded music off of the radio all the time as a kid, and later recorded all my friends albums onto cassettes, I feel the entire thing was ridiculous.
mp3s were such a step up though, once you heard them you never go back
@@flytoday mp3s are a huge giant step down from records and CDs. The music is compressed and missing much of it sound
@@drunvert CDs and records are better than mp3s but mp3s are probably better than cassette. The best thing about mp3, is the number of songs you could have on a very small device, which was portable.
We take it for granted now, but it was a big thing in the early 2000s.
My favorite CDs are downloaded with flac, not mp3, because file size doesn't matter anymore. Now, most people stream anyway. That was not an option back then.
@drunvtrue , but the commerical crap folks listen to is mostly. Artificial from the start, and not worth that much musically rt
@@drunvert that's why you use .flac
Imagine a punk band being mad at someone pirating though. The irony.
Nirvana: steal our music.. no problems here... As long as... Dave Grohl gets his coffee -- FRESH POTS
Or rappers , rapping F the police and the law but they go crying to the law when their shit gets infringed
@@2tooful ..or cry when THEIR mommas " get used as bia...es like they need and like it" :-D
@@2tooful Right! It's the most un-gangster thing everrrr 🤣🤣🤣
@@CreditSolutionist especially when the people barely have enough for rent and you’re fucking rich.
"This will kill the music industry"
No, you guys did that on your own.
@@Bauernade oh no, the record label execs will only be able to afford an 80ft yacht, not the 120ft yacht they wanted 😢
@@Bauernade because CD was a shit medium and the idustry didnt adapt as fast as napster did
@@Bauernade
After so many of the boomers replaced their vinyl with CD's , CD sales dropped significantly. Corporations bought up a large number of record companies that had previously been privately owned after seeing that initial windfall of vinyl replacement. Once that windfall peaked out, like other financial bubbles, it popped.
@@Fhwgads11 imagine u spend time making a song recording it editing it and everything for someone to take it and give it out for free to anyone making ur hard work useless as a job… it’s literally theft… still disagree? What if u made a phone and had to spend let’s say $600 per phone. But then someone took ur creations copied it fully and gave it to people for free then everyone “bought” that phone instead. That would be theft right? Plus a breaking of copy right by them.. it’s the same with msuic people spend time and money to make songs and people steal them… also snout the money thing… u just are jealous of them… unlike u they actually put effort to get into that medium. And do more overall… obvious there gonna make a lot of money.. and remember, if it was u you’d be doing the same thing about piracy
@@anonymouspokemon4623 your easily smarter then me ....
Wasnt there a south park episode where piracy was affecting music artists to where they couldn't afford their premium private jet so they had to settle for a normal one lol
Yeah lol.
sad but true
"NOT A BIG DEAAL UH?" lol great episode
Yeah it was funny episode and applies to some musicians but statistically most musicians don't have it like that and aren't stable financially because of terrible deals where they don't even own their masters or publishing so it did affect those one who already getting less than 50% of revenue for their music
That was Lars on South Park but honestly look at Gene Simmons speak in the beginning of this... He's just trying to stay on top of his own greed ladder
The RIAA spent 2.9 million dollars to sue people that are barely getting by. Yet Ticketmaster is running around charging "service fees" to concert goers because they know we ultimately have no choice. Can we sue Ticketmaster? Should we? Or do we just shrug our shoulders and say "F..k it..I might as well pay the fees..."
We totally need to sue them. On the basis of legal scalping where people buy boat loads of tickets for big names, then resell them BACK on ticketmaster for 300-1000% the original price. Ticketmaster doesnt give a shit cause they get twice the fees for one ticket!
Idk how this is considered legal but definitely shouldn't be!
I dont . I don't pay ticket Master anything and refuse to . My kids don't either.
Ticketmaster has already been sued a few times and not much has ever happened to them.
Real question is. Who the fuck are you going to see? Modern music is garbage in all genres. And half the time you are just paying to watch someone lip sync poorly.
Ticketmasters arbitration clause is so vague it’s nearly impossible to sue them.
It's been a long time since I've heard about the RIAA. It leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.
RIAA after Twitch atm
How old are you people?? 🤣
@@RobertJackson-sl1mk lol You should watch the South Park episode where the music of the next generation sounds like shit to the adults.
@@RobertJackson-sl1mk There's "good" music, you just have to look for it. Most of those bands are touring and doing quite well outside of the US.
Reading "RIAA" also leaves a shitty taste in my mouth. I never uploaded music but these days there are alternatives and musicians still make plenty of money, specially when they have a website to download individual tracks for a small price which I support. Lucky for me, most of the music I listen to, the artists are dead or in geriatric homes :P
This is one video I'm actually surprised wasn't sponsored by NordVPN.
I think in hindsight, it’s important we look at how the government and the justice system leapt to the aid of the recording industry. Protecting capital over all else. Even to the point of going after students and poor people to somehow make amends for fictitious losses by a dying industry.
@David Lonnqvist Because it's an unrealistic assumption that all the pirated songs represented lost sales.
@David Lonnqvist - if you are claiming losses that treat pirated copies as equal to lost sales - as the record labels did - then that portion of imaginary money you never got and realistically never would have got are the fictitious losses.
This is America. The entire criminal justice system from the police all the way up to the supreme Court is there to protect the property of the rich, not the people
@David Lonnqvist - I already said what was meant by "fictitious losses". Two times. I'm not sure what else you want explained.
@David Lonnqvist Because you can't prove what I might buy or not buy.
The real screwed up part about this whole riaa and file sharing story is that while they were using Shawn Fanning for Napster, the record companies were going behind the RIAA's back and asking Napster to provide data to them because they realized that people weren't just downloading music, they were making decisions about what they like and that had value. So on one side you're being sued for damages, on the other side you are being paid for user data. It's all a big mess and nobody came out of it undamaged or a head. The music industry today is nothing like it was in the 80s and 90s and nothing will ever be like that again. It's such a sad story.
No one was ever sued for downloading music. There were sued for UPLOADING music. (making the downloaded music available to others to download, a default setting of the sharing software)
9:37 this 12 yr old?
@@TheBooban 9:40 "she admitted to swapping music online"
Carey!
Good to hear someone else pointing this out too.
You can definitly be condemned for download in france, they give you warnings before tho.
I think USA's Court system is one of the strangest in the world. How in earths name did they come up with 22,500 USD per song!!
As mentioned in the video, its usually meant for commercial fraud. That means an organization producing bootlegs can suffer those penalties and such an organization could cost the record companies millions on their own. The RIAA just got dumb and tried to use it on individuals. The laws in the 90s weren't caught up with the technology. And to be honest they probably never tried because of the evolving landscape to digital media.
@Zyphera The courts don't set the min/max punishment, a legislature does that. The "courts", judge or jury, decide a sentence or fine based on the established guidelines.
The court system was set up by, and made for the rich and property owners. The laws reflect crimes against them as very harsh, and crimes that they commit are usually easy with a small fine
@@ststst981 I will not agree or disagree with your points. My comment was simply made to point out who has dictated the range of "acceptable punishment" when a crime or violation has a mandatory minimum sentence/fine.
In germany it is the same.
I’m still waiting to download a car.
That’s baby talk, I’m gonna download a house
soon
I'd love to do it as a huge gear head. Hope we can download cars like in Gran Turismo.
@@multistuff9831 im downloading the moon... 1265422849937573 more TB
Multi-material commercial 3d printing is on the way.
It's crazy how many artists were on the side of the record companies knowing how little money they made from sales. The ceos were literally stealing their profits.
Scared of change? Paid to do it by the record labels? Forced to do it by the record label contract? Those seemed to be as plausible as ignorance.
Lars Ulrich whined and complained about royalties while remaink silent about proper pay for Dave Mustaine. I also recall someone asking him if he ever had bootleg music on a cassette tape... silence and crickets ensued
@@wolphin732 I'm thinking the very successful ones had to because the labels had the power to shut down their live performances over anything the artist said that they didn't care for.
They couldn't afford to promote themselves..
I used to use these sites to find new music I didn’t wanna pay for , found some bands I really liked and even ended up buying merch , the albums, concert tickets , so they made their money back lmao
@Ethan Hammons nah. That is rare. Never accept when someone asks to pay in exposure rather than money.
@@flaglag7672 yes, being payed in exposure is bad, but exposure gets your fans, and fans get you cash.
@Ethan Hammons As someone that works in fine arts, if a client ever tells me they can pay me less/none because of potential “exposure”, they can sod off
@@btat16 that's why your channel is 10 years old and has 53 subscribers
@@shaggy1531 You can tell by my name and profile picture that I care DEEPLY about my channel… I think you seem to care more than I do since you bothered checking ;)
They went after a 12-year-old, that like trying to sue a kid for stealing penny sweats.
A firm telling off and some form of punishment might have been a better idea.
they still do that. epic games took a 14 year old kid to court 2 years ago or something lol
@@Kittysuit LOL. Shut up with the BS, kid was making and selling hacks/cheats. Anybody who does that regardless of age deserves to be sued. Ruining the experience for thousands of people by installing software that breaks TOS and also effects servers.
Country Time suing a lemonade stand. 😂
@@DaggerofTime Yeah, don't do it, but at least make the punishment fit the crime. How many of us have watched private DVDs and even VHS. Who actually took the piracy is a crime advert that seriously as a child. Even games, since the SNES, I've had almost every major title and have no issue with using emulators. I played Pilot Wings the other day on an emulator; I paid for the game at some point, well my parents did, and it has been lost over the years. So technically, it's illegal because I don't have the physical copy anymore.
Cheating on games, yeah, it ruins matches, but I can't remember a time when it hasn't been like that. Take Titan Fall, for example, Respawn won't sort it out, and the second one is going the same way. Respawn isn't bothered and still selling Titan Fall One for £20 when the game is completely broken.
If developers actually devoted time to anti-cheat systems, it wouldn't be such an issue. If 14-year-olds can ruin games that cost hundreds of millions to make, it is pretty poor.
Lol, my father was sued for me pirating with 13 years bc we only had one PC back then
From personal experience I can say the RIAA is basically a bunch of power hungry executives in fancy offices. Back in the late 2000's, one of my rodeo groups tried to pay the RIAA for the background music we planed to use at our upcoming rodeo. Over several months, we sent many e-mails, several registered letters, and left numerous phone messages. They never responded to any of our attempts to contact them. In the middle 2010s another of my rodeo groups received a legal notice to pay RIAA $20,000 for use of their music at a recent rodeo. (the total box office for that rodeo is generally only a few thousand dollars all of which is either used to rent the facility or is given to charities) This, despite the fact that the IRAA's own rules say that nonprofit events where music is simply used as background are limited to a total of $20 per event. We sent them a $20 check and never heard from them again, even though all our rodeos still use commercial music as background.
It was really scary at the time I remember I was told by my dad not to bring my mp3 full of pirated music when crossing the border so we don’t risk selling our house and filing bankruptcy. Glad there are streaming services now.
I personally helped digitize my parents' music collection from vinyl and tape, so that they wouldn't have to pay the record companies a third time for the same damn music.
Me too... I mean they had already bought it on vinyl, tape, and CD in some cases. Why pay for the same music 3-5 times each time the media format changes???
It makes me think of the same issue of right to own/right to repair with vhs (rentals), video games, tractors for farming.
@@MrDarthvis yes we also watched that Motherboard video on the right to farm equipment repair
i digitized my tape collection & some family VHS videos several years back.. using an Elgato product back when they were just a lesser known brand. It's nice that i can pull up college radio mixes and such that i recorded when i was younger right on my devices.
Lmao sometimes I buy music on digital download and end up still streaming the same song because it's just more convenient in situations like if I want it to play next in queue to other songs I'm streaming that I haven't bought
Music piracy has dropped significantly because you can easily buy the individual song you want for usually a dollar and not be forced to spend $20 for an entire album filled with songs you have no interest in.
Or because you can listen to the song/album for free on youtube, youtube music or spotify
@@samppa7901 I always found it easy to find singles in record stores supermarkets and local markets . It wasn’t that hard
@@samppa7901 and convert to mp3 on top of that
@@coolelectronics1759 yup
I doubt it's dropped as much as you'd think. You just don't hear about it due to the RIAA not really being able to do much if anything. Pirating is still alive and kicking. Just technology has progressed so much that's virtually impossible to track any one person down.
It’s a story about established industries struggling to adapt to change. A never ending story.
It’s about greed bro.
@teflontelefon I agree but it’s been that way since the dawn of time. At the end of the day to be specific we are all selfish to an extent. Short example. A person gets involved romantically or even marriage. They are doing so to please themselves reality they are looking out for their pleaser and comfort. The difference is if they dish out as much as they receive separates the defined selfish from self equality. At the end of the day most (not all) but most let self pleasures and comfort exceed the consideration of others pleaser and comfort. My opinion if you ever come across an individual that truly considers others happiness before themselves you might want to show the same to them cause those type of people more rare then a solar eclipse. I would gladly go through 99 selfish, self righteous, self centered, greedy, cheating, lying pieces of 💩 just to find that 1 friend/mate that will put his or her friends family and even strangers before themselves. I don’t boast by saying this but it truly is me but I wake up every morning and try to make everyone I encounter smile/laugh. No matter what my day, week or even month has been like. I may sound sensitive but that’s cause I am. At the same time I’m not one to be stepped over. It’s a balance that has to be met. The world isn’t getting any better so it’s agreeable that we make the best of the times we do have. I just realized how much I’m commenting sorry lol you just seem like you are pretty chill.
@teflontelefon I subscribed to you btw
@@gator2955 why? He doesn't make videos.
@teflontelefon Copyright laws goes aginst nature? You mean stealing goes against nature??🤔 I would like to "share information" about your credit card data so we all can enjoy it. Go away, troll. These idiots in the video were offered settlements in the range of of a few thousands of dollars, but they wanted to pull theatrics and paid for it.
I remember learning the term "rip" music from a CD to put onto my mp3 player. We would show our playlists to friends and compare how many songs we had on our players. That was an indication of how much time we spent ripping CDs, downloading from Napster, and how cool we were. Downloading and sharing files is how I discovered an whole new genre of music! In my small hick town, we had a country station, a religious station, and a classic rock station that played more disco than anything. Metal and grunge were new and exciting, and I never heard of Metallica before Napster. So there's that.
They pointed out the greatest argument against RIAA. Just because someone is downloading your music for free doesn’t mean the labels and artists were actually losing money. Most people who did it would never go out and pay for it. If you’re going to sue a lone individual for downloads and claim it cost you money, you would have to prove that person would’ve purchased the music in lieu of the piracy, and that’s impossible. Imagine paying $17 for a CD. They scammed us for years. To hell with them.
JmJimmy and the JmJimmy clan were as guilty as sin. Just search dsl reports for JmJimmy and all his thievery.
@@clevertaghere3297 It’s incredible. And you were forced to pay that price for an album where you might like a few songs.
What did he say it costs them? $0.30? They were making a $16+ profit!!
Most people want one or two good songs, not the whole album.
Thats very true. I just wouldnt own any of the things i pirate, especially over priced games
19:59 “...Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue...The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” - Gabe Newell
Like Netflix killed movie piracy
@@apoorv_mc Exactly
Gabe N is on a whole higher level intellectually than almost anybody in any other business. The existence of Half life 2 and Alyx prove that to me beyond a doubt, so does the Steam program itself, Newell is already living in 2100.
@@apoorv_mc he said in this video too that streaming services like spotify, apple music is also helping decline music privacy.
@@gavintantleff my dad downloaded films and music off Newsbin and sold it to the poorer people in my county. He was slowly losing business, so he switched to selling large bundles of movies (like over a 100 or so) for a discount. His business didn't go down till he took 4 to the chest and died about 6 years.
I was a Napster wiz and was one of the few kids at school who had a CD burner in my pc. Let’s just say that my computer was never shut off due to constant downloads and burning for classmates. Ahhh, the good days.
You actually helped musicians get exposure.I wish people would steal my music.😃
@@allywilkeforsenate funny when you put it like that but true lol 😂
Dude those were the days!! 🙏🏽
@@allywilkeforsenate that was a rationalization at the time. Being at a tech Uni with fast ethernet was a match made in heaven for music sharing. And a lot of people did get exposed to new groups, tried it an album before buying it, etc.
I was a limer for awhile mostly looking for digital versions of music I had bought in the 80s on inferior cassette. Or things boomers and silents were sharing off old vinyl that you couldn't buy, like very early Sinatra as a young singer for a big band orchestra, not a top recording artist. More of that out there these days but I still have tracks I have never heard anywhere else.
Is that you Miguel?
This video was absolutely great. And so needed. Thanks for the hard work making a documentary and explainer that just had to exist.
Now you can't even play a song for 5 seconds on TH-cam without it claiming the whole video. LOVELY.
yea the bots are bad there was a speed runner who let genius show some of his video and they slapped the original video of his with a claim lol they tried to claim his video was there because they showed a few seconds of it in there video it was a nightmare to set straight these companies that run these bots are almost as bad as paten trolls
Good
But sometime there’s is false clam and that suck so much
remember reading about a Danish teenager who got sued for a million dollar amount and got so scared and freaked out she tried to kill her self.
Lol good story
Lawyers go to hell you know
@@Sernival hell is an allegory for misplaced intellectual capasity... and lawyers typically are pretty smart.. so actually no. hell is reserved for people who think they know everything.. but actually know jack shit.
@@whoiscodyblood Some lawyers are smart, just like any other category. They are learned. There is a difference, and any suing kids, single moms or homeless people (or college kids) deserve to burn.
@@whoiscodyblood A smart person would know not to assert their interpretation of a concept as fact. Also - since I'm a jackass *capacity.
“The handful of gatekeepers who controlled what got played on the radio” hasn’t this part actually gotten worse over the last 20 years? Every radio station in the entire USA is owned by fucking Clear Channel and plays the same 10 songs
The thing is the radio doesn't matter or control the music industry at this point. Front page of spotify or apple music (shit even being a tiktok trend) trumps any amount of radio play a song will get.
The radio is a lot less relevant than it used to be
I turned the radio off years ago. I can't imagine what insane noise they're broadcasting today
Delete this antisemitic take
What's radio?
Your pacing, delivery, and production on this video was awesome. I really enjoyed it. Thank you!
I was one of those students. I got sued for a huge amount of money, but settled for a few hundred. As a broke college student, that seemed horrible but I actually don't remember that I ever actually paid. The judgement is nearly twenty years old now, so I'm not too worried.
Court documents will arrive in your mailbox now that you commented on it. =).
Haha, you should be good to go. Im just messing with ya.
I was a pioneer of Napster as well. Never got sued. Still have the cd’s I burned of all that music.
Duuude there's no statute of limitations on piracy.....🤣😎
@@scotttild thanks, I am aware...was pulling the dude's chain
I for one was tired of having to shell out my hard earned money to buy a CD that had maybe one song I liked. When I later found out that a tiny fraction of my money went to the artist, I stopped paying for music. THAT is the fault of the greedy RIAA.
I remember hearing a single on the radio and then buying the album and the rest of the album was trash. So frustrating
so you didn't like their business model of "one good song and the rest filler"? Must be your fault music's trash. Oh wait, it's probably the music companies really
There was nothing like downloading a bunch of songs. 13 hours later your CD was ready.
😂😂😂😂 would take foreeeeevvvvveeeerrrrr lol and worth it tho
Sooo time consuming lol
I remember the first full CD I ever downloaded. Nice person who was chatting with me stuck around so I could get it.
🤣😂🤣😂 yep
Wow 13 hours? Not on my dial-up😂😂 maybe 2 weeks... Unless someone calls
Congrats. As a musicologist, semi-pro musician, die-hard music lover from classical music to rock, I lived through all this. And I think I can form a professional opinion. I think you nailed it, and reported as objectively as possible.
Metallica said in an interview they grew up as teens sharing tapes of albums they didn't have to broaden their music listening and how amazing it was getting new bands on a cassette from a friend,,, decades late they call Napster thieves., this is why Metallica sucks, amongst other reasons..
The thing is usually everyone did Tape trading when the grew up in a certain time. Especially in the Metal scene some of my older friends had in the times before the internet friends in many countrys and where sending out the best stuff weekly and got the same amount of stuff back.
@@mrn234 I know so did I growing up , but its still copyright infringement , whether its taping and sharring a cassette or downloading and sharing, but Metallica seems to think cassettes are different that the internet,. the hypocrisy is deafening,
Truth
I hear you but there's a difference between taping a few mate's albums, then maybe buying stuff yourself if you get into artists, vs wholesale ripping anything & everything because it's literally all $nada being your ethos, and then distributing it all like it's oxygen. I DJ out as an amateur and always pay for every f download so I can in some way support artists (apart from 4 or 5 remixes I'm "not allowed" to buy legally in my "territory" because some licensing BS). I'm amongst dj's who clearly rip their sht for free and make a living from it, as their downloads are BS quality. But then nobody in an audience gives a f. about quality from a bad sound system, so who really cares? I despair for the artists and dj producers :-(
@@mrl4342 these people got done for a minimal amount of downloads .. not thousands, plus if you download one album your still breaking the law , if you tape one album and distribute it your still breaking the law, copyright is copyright, you cant argue the law. thats my point its hypocrisy to nail one person for downloading 3 albums and yet we all say we did it in our youths and its different.
I work full time in the music industry and have dealt with copyright lawyers over an advertising jingle . I know the struggle as a musician to get paid so I dont condone ripping anyone ,but if you dont buy an artists album because you were given a cassette copy, or a usb copy or you found it online and downloaded for free the artist misses out on that sale , period.
The music industry in my humble opinion is killing themselves. They no longer allow TH-cam creators to push their fun music and their videos for copyright claim and so no one ever hears about certain songs that people would then go and listen to
This is why indie artists are so great right now
What's really crazy when the song is made in America just like with our movies and they say not available in your country you wouldn't have it if it were for the usa that you hate some of you from another country who hate our country. That's youtube for ya they do nothing to protect anyone but themselves. What can you expect out of california. Crestons wife speaking
I listen to Harry Mack, coke lam, the great Leon, from blue to Greene, Marcus Veltri, blind fury and all the other independent TH-cam musicians who upload regularly without any record deal.
Tom McDonald is another one that’s been getting a lot of attention
The industry record label wise is dead but indie music is booming.
@@darylingoteborg3178 is their deal with TH-cam fair? Ad revenue and such
*_RIAA finds out a 12 year old girl downloaded music_*
Me: They're not gonna demand money from a chil-
RIAA: GIVE US OUR MONEY LITTLE GIRL!
Im pretty sure fortnite did something similar within the recent years
@@Divisiondoorway it was towards some kid advertising cheats
This part made me legit mad. Like...I have no sympathy for that buisness now
They're dying. Dying people tend to flail a lot before they die.
I can't believe they fucking settled, too - as if a 12 year old girl could be held accountable for her actions lol
This is a really comprehensive documentary. Please continue to make more great videos like this.
have to respect that woman's persistence. if not for her the RIAA would probably still be going after people with ludicrous fines.
I think we owe a lot to her. I wonder where she is now. We need a large mural of her painted on the buildings of Los Angeles. Haha jk. Really though, we do owe her a lot. Perhaps she will see this comment and reply.
Both of them
@@timetravelvictim I need a Jamie dakimakura
If I was jamie fuck the record company. Rather not pay them a single dime.
I love that there's a huge retrospective of the music industry to answer this one question. Great job!
I love you Jay ♥️... hope you are having a wonderful day brah 😁
wow answering a question well requires historical context? what a crazy idea
It's crazy that these people want tobe paid for something they love to do. It's all bogus man.
Napster was freedom for the Masses to rightfully enjoy the music of their choice... free from the constraints of the man.
It's also odd but my sister, who is pretty hot really if I'm just being honest, like music too.
Music is free for the people.
agreed... but i also am kinda sad that it feels like we are glossing over many years of evolution in the music industry too.. I lived with my tape cassettes and CDs for a long long while.
Aaaaaaaah an OSW Axclooosive
Like Gabe Newell once said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
Steam is so good as a service it makes it very unlikely that I would ever consider pirating a PC game so his philosophy seems to work
@@aidang2717 "very unlikely that i would ever consider pirating" that's probably because you have money
@@Мөнхдөл I have pirated before, it is just I really like steam and it is often free of things in other industries that annoy me about their business practices and how they treat their users so I would be more likely to save up for steam than I would be for other media
For real.. for a long time I would download pirated movies and tv shows because it was ridiculously expensive to have to buy all the cable packages just to get the one with, say AMC so I could watch walking dead. When services like Netflix became affordable and easy to use I completely stopped downloading because the frustration of downloading good versions finally outweighed the cost of the legitimate service.
@@Мөнхдөл a "lost sale" to a "customer" that has "no money" in the first place, is not the "lost revenue in sales" that content "creators" can reasonably ask for compensation in the law suit.
This reminds of the story of the schoolgirl who was illegally downloading music and video off of the Internet and was punished by her father, who is a judge. She was ready with a webcam when her father came into her bedroom to punish her again for a repeat offense. The daughter released the video of her beating online.
What ever happened?
Was it on Dr. Phil episode? I recognize it before
I can’t get over how well done this video is. I was captivated the entire time !
“sister spill” 🤡
"Seoul" 🤡
the phyiscal media days were horrible and they ripped us off like crazy. now we get revenge
I was passing out, and then this fucking video kept me up for a while 😐🤣 it was worth it tho
Ich bin made love to a hooker once, it wasn’t really worth the money.
The true heroes in this story are the lawyers. They worked pro bono for years. Sure they had the money to do it and it was great publicity for their law companies. But they helped these people when they needed them the most.
LOL.... Yes those people who didn't have 2 million dollars NEEDED help... -_- smfh, if you don't have 2 million you can't be sued for your soul... you just never pay, and never care to.
@@Enders I'm not quite sure what you mean. Personal bankruptcy isn't a joke either way. Sure, you'll never pay, but it follows you your whole life. Not to mention the stress of legal battles is never easy.
@@Enders I think this is the dumbest shit I have ever read.
Aren't they required to do a certain amount of pro bono work per year to keep their license? I could just be making that up though lmao
@@greennin but they deserved it.
They did Jamie dirty in that first courtroom drawing, god damn. They made her look like Smeagol
Haha omg
It was the artist's first day, give them a break! lmao
Does she not?
Drawing a courtroom scene would be an intense gig! I'd love to do it.
Lol ha
Dude this video was beyond excellent, very well done work man.
One interesting factor was in the 90's record labels colluded to more or less kill or suppress singles sales. If you wanted to own an individual song you needed to buy the album. This jacked up album sales higher than they'd ever been (as mentioned). But this also created a feeling among the fans they were getting ripped off.
Singles in CD were still available but only for a few albums. But it didn't matter. I remember a single costing like 6 dollars. Freaking insane. They still had singles but priced it so it would never make sense to buy it.
@@theelite1x721987 I see, makes sense if that was their strategy. Singles were not banned as such, they were just not promoted, marketed or priced in the way they had been.
meanwhile, in japan, cd sales are still strong because you can't pirate concert tickets, handshake tickets, and any event perks bundled with the physical copy. Some fans of a well-known idol group purchase multiple copies just to get multiple event tickets. The bundled items and perks became far more valuable than the copy of the music itself.
They are also very good at only sell some exclusive discs at some physical event that cannot be bought anywhere else
People cannot pirate a song when there's like only 100 copies scattered half-accross the globe from them--Cutting oversea fans potential chance to buy one for themselves in the process.
It might lead to strong sales, but it's definitely not healthy for the overall industry. Japan is great at extracting as much disposable income from really small groups of really dedicated fans. It's basically what mobile games do these days. Instead of charging 99 cents per player, they want players putting their entire life savings into "microtransactions". This will never be a healthy business model for anyone involved.
Not disputing what you're saying, but out here, the Japanese are easy to frighten with regulations/rules. If an authoritative body says "Don't do that" then a vast majority of them won't do it. I notice many Spotify users out here and even that, I think, took longer to catch on.
It's also surprising how slow they move with the times. It took smartphones a lot longer to catch on out here than it did in other countries. (Not exactly related, but I was in an electronics department store last week and I saw a wall of portable CD players for sale. A few years ago, they were still selling VHS tapes lol).
@@MrBannystar being in a 30 year recession doesn't help i imagine
@@MrBannystar japan has the oldest population on earth. Old people dont like new things.
I remember back in the 2000s when I thought people should have the right to upload, download, and overall listen to the music they want online without consequences. My brother called me a "communist" and my mother agreed and badmouthed me.
Ironically, he pirated nearly every NES, SNES, and Genesis game on his computer. And my mother is a hardcore conspiracy theory nut now.
Ever pirate PSP games? Sht was lit
@@avarice4556 dark alex was a hero
@Wally better then being a closed
Minded sheep
COMMUNUST DETECTED ON AMERICAN SOIL ACTIVATE LAWSUIT
Lmfaoooo the irony
That was a trip down memory lane! When I was 15 in 05' I got sued (technically my single mom) for copyright infringement. $22,500,000.00! I forgot to "not share" on lime wire. So I was sharing like 3-4000 songs. We ended up settling for $4000.00 plus another 4k in attorney fees. I eventually paid my mom back after 4 years.
I had over 10,000 songs but i never shared cause it would slow me down.
You actually paid 8 grand over this! 😂
Yeah back in 05'
@@ImionsaeXwb77 Well that kind of destroys the entire idea of file SHARING now don't it!
@@Moonlightshadow-lq4fr Hell I started from a 14.4 dial up modem, do you know how fast that thing was and when the faster modem were released do you know how much them thing cost...? Forget the sharing.....
Judging by the artists lifestyle, cars and houses I don't think my use of Soulseek has had much impact on their revenue.
Artists get a loan from the record company and use it on cars and houses then go broke in middle age
@@Hello-zf5lq snoop dog is living life like a boss🤷🏻♂️
@@josephshamon7824 snopp dog is snopp dog😎
I don't think we can say much about the state of an industry based on the most successful 0.01% of participants.
Exactly. Because bands hardly even make their money from record sales. All their real money comes from live shows. So pirating literally does nothing to hurt them. And so I'll continue doing as I please. Soulseek is the shit.
the funny thing is that for myself and most of my friends, we actually bought music based on something we heard for free. Ultimately, the "free" music was our gateway to new artists and bands we would never had heard on the radio. And this is the ultimate comedy in all of this. What the RIAA was really trying to protect was the monopoly they held over us through terrestrial radio. The radio network is where the real effect was. They no longer control our ability to hear new bands, artists and songs like they did in previous decades. And that is a good thing.
The Japanese music industry is the most ridiculously hardass about this, and has never even warmed up to any kind of digital distribution. Consequently only members of freakishly esoteric communities in the U.S. (which makes up about half of the world's music market) are aware that Japan has ever produced music.
Radio and stores. Back during the time this story took place, it was very hard for an independent label to get their CDs into record stores - and quite ridiculous to even think of getting them into the big chain stores like Walmart where the big money was. You needed connections, volume manufacture, and a huge marketing budget for that. There was really no music industry outside of the RIAA or their various national counterparts.
I’ve purchased a lot of vinyl records on artists’ Bandcamp pages from their songs I heard on streaming. Yeah, Spotify is a shitty company and artists should make way more money per play, but I’ve discovered so many tiny bands I’d never even hear if it weren’t for streaming. It’s cool to actually buy their stuff and know they get a significant cut.
Same. And I would have likely not bought any music back then because I rarely listened to music.
Not sure its a good thing. Music sucks now, and has been getting worse. Having someone to filter out the crap might have been a pro.
meanwhile we're all watching this on youtube... the place where people have been listening to music for free since, well, since it launched. lol
TH-cam !!! Better than Napster, full albums and songs you listen/watch in real time on demand.
Be careful of uploading videos with music playing in the background! I find that new stretch of copyright rules just ridiculous.
@@Helicopterpilot16 i wonder if an acapella cover would get a strike as well? that would be proof that their tech is getting better but their common sense is getting farther.
@@donloder1 I believe so, especially if they used the artists original instrumentals. It's literally ruined part of what it means to be a creator. Of course someone who uses background music isn't claiming to own the rights. Instead we get that cancerous EDM bleep blow shit that pings into my ears. Reminds me of the old 009 sound system. Their copyright rules made TH-cam vanilla.
But they can shove ads before after and during your content here
1:10 I had that stereo in 76, this is the first time Ive seen a picture of it out side of my photo album
Imagine how out of touch anyone would have to be to think they're gonna get $10,000+ out of the average person. The RIAA slept in the bed they made.
Yeah, although college universities get that and more from most students... You just paid off with a lifetime of monthly payments and misery.
@@michaelcorcoran8768 the horrible thing with student debt is that you cannot declare bankruptcy on it
@@karolakkolo123 same with car debts
I think it was a natural extension of their thinking that they should price a $.75 CD for $25.99.
The aim was never to get the money. It was to make an example of them. Pick a few pirates, make a very public show of ruining their lives, and then hold that up as a deterrent. "Are you pirating music? Then you might be next."
The amount of audio I downloaded as a pre-teen and teen in the early 2000s is hilariously beyond anything one could imagine. Even movies lol
@@blueberryjelly9815 I have 6 hard drives around 500GB each, but now I just stream 4K rips to my shield TV Pro with real debrid. So I stream 80GB files with ease as I have gigabit speed. So my drives sit collecting dust these days.
@@TheLondonCyclist F
I bet the record companies would love to jail kids that download music without paying
@@cody4916 They tried and failed in the early 2000s.
@@TheLondonCyclist no one gives a shit
Of course Dave Grohl was cool as hell about it while greedy people like Lars and Gene were suing people left and right.
“You will all be sorry,” lol.
Don't forget Sonny Bono.
"Copyright is forever minus 1 day"...
One of the many reasons why Dave is awesome.
You do know that Lars will need more money for 2nd or 3rd planes right? Fucking terrible music.
Record company need a search warrant to search those hard drives, how did they know people had illegal music without breaking privacy laws 🤔
I assume those privacy laws were nonexistent back then
Metallica may not have been been "responsible" but Lars was the face of the Anti-Napster/File sharing movement. He was carting around print outs of user names. Southpark made an episode of it. Showed him crying because he could only afford one gold toilet. XD
Yeah I actually never listen to metalicka ever again after that lol I only have silver toilets lol fuk him today bic boi
@@AboveEmAllProduction Right on!
I was tempted to send Metallica a copy of Master Of Puppets I got in Vietnam for ~$2.
Lets not forget Lars done drugs plenty of times
@@juslitor I don't care about his drug use, or anything else, this is enough for me.
Lol, the Napster days. I remember bragging to a friend of mine around 1999 "My work computer has such a good internet connection that I can download a 3MB song from Napster in 30-60 seconds."
Better than the 15 minutes it took with the modem at home :D
That was pretty impressive back then to be honest.
That is a totally legitimate brag for 1999.
I can remember when you had to download songs in parts, often 10. So 1/10, 2/10, 3/10,.... Each part would take about 10 minutes to download, and then you had to have a specific piece of software to put the parts together. Downloading an album was a full day job.
i even had a napster t-shirt
Can’t believe the jury sided with the record industry. They would never, ever get me to agree.
American jury, property is worth more than life
See what you say when you don't get paid at your job.
everyone on those jurys are scumbags for not choosing $750 per song. but piracy was new at the time and most of the jury would have been too old to understand since they don't select teenagers for jury duty
@@yorkshirelad007in the case of someone breaking into your home? Yes. In piracy? I value the lives of individuals more than greedy companies
it all goes to the instructions from the judge the jury receives and the fact they jury is never under any circumstances informed of their constitutional right to jury nullification...............the fact is jury's are not actually bound by the judges instructions and always have the right to ignore those instructions and vote their mind...........................if you disagree with a law or its application as a jury member you have the legal right to ignore them .
Isn't it a strange coincidence how over-commercialisation of music happened at the same time as sales dropped off? Weird. Must blame the listeners.
This was when people started realizing the court system was in the pockets of big industry.
It still is and will always be
politicians get the help they need to become elected and then they pay back the favor.
By the time you get to the end you realize that they basically sued people to their own demise.
When you have unlimited amounts of money you can have anyone in your back pockets when you need them to do your biddings..
Not really since people knew the law. Not to mention most the awards were by the Jury. Zero issue with the lawsuits.
I'm 41, i lived through it all. I had a couple thousand songs downloaded from Limewire. I bought very few albums after say 2000. But i've had Spotify for years now and happily pay $10 a month because finding, downloading, uploading, sorting and renaming MP3's was a huge P.I.T.A! Thank god for streaming services.
10 a month nah
@@inab9779 You're choice. Here in Australia it's $11.99aud (about $9usd) a month. It's not much to someone like me for the ability to play exactly what i want when i want. It's about choice.
@spindletea again, it's a few dollars. Who cares. Damn, how poor are you people?
I’m 39 and remember it like it was yesterday. Bearshare was another good platform. But a big problem you were having with using these sites was that some files contained viruses, malware, or spyware. Yes, now I happily pay the subscriptions. I even pay for TH-cam premium because the time it saves me not having to listen to ads makes it well worth the cost.
@@tomcat8662 True, true. So many viruses...
I still have a song labeled "Temallica - Renter ManSan" just for the Limewire nostalgia
Good work in this piece. Well done!