Illegal+Downloading


 * Illegal Downloading: A Cry for Justice**

We are living in an era of technology. Thanks to the digital age, sharing songs, movies, television shows, videos and almost any other form of media imaginable, has become as easy as clicking a mouse. With the internet we can get all sorts of information at our fingertips in seconds. So with all this file transfer and information exchange, who’s to say what gets exchanged and what doesn’t? Copyright and other similar laws get lost in the throng of internet users that partake in the illegal copying and downloading of music, movies, etc. But why? Why would people steal their entertainment?

The answer is quite simple: the lifeblood of our world and the driving force behind everything that is in today’s age. Money.

Why pay over twenty dollars for a CD when you can just get it off the internet faster and for free? Pricing is the major issue in the case of downloading music. Music is something almost everyone enjoys on a daily basis today. If every teenager in America bought all of the music they listened to, we would be living in a nation of incredibly wealthy adolescents, and even wealthier musicians and record labels.

Now I understand that the record business is indeed a business, and musicians work hard on recording albums to sell and make profit off of. Making music is a service and services do have to be paid for. Copyrighted music is copyrighted and shouldn’t be stolen; laws are still laws, of course. But maybe people wouldn’t have to resort to illegal downloading if music was available at a more affordable price.

A musical group’s only source of revenue is not record sales. Bands can tour, make money on tickets, sell merchandise, take part in advertisements, and countless other things to make a profit. A band that is truly deserving of my money should do more than just record an album in a studio, wrap and release twelve tracks for $17.99 and sit back and watch the cash flow in. If music was sold for lower prices, I can almost guarantee more of it would be sold.