It sounds great from the consumer's perspective that they will download the music first and if they like it they will pay for it later. But you can't expect the record company to ever see this as a good thing, without even painting them as greedy bloodsucking monsters who just want to steal $15 from you for 1 song you'll actually like.
Imagine if you boss came to you one day and said, "You've been working here how long? 20 years? About that. Well things are going to change now. From now on you're only going to get paid if I feel you've done a good job that week. Also, I may not get around to actually giving you the money for a few months, because you know, I may think you did a good job at the time, but later on it may turn out that it wasn't as good as I thought, and I really don't want to get ripped off."
You wouldn't be very happy. Even if there is some fairness in there, you do a good job you get paid, you don't do a good job you don't. Except you have no control over what that decision is based on. Your boss may just make up a reason not to pay you. There is no accountabilty. There is no appeal. And you have a mortgage to pay.
Try going to a stockholders' meeting and saying that your new business model is based on the honor system.
And while it seems very counter-productive for the industry to sue its customers, it must seem counter-productive to the industry for its customers to want to destroy it. Because that's what a lot of its customers do want to see happen, it to not exist.
Now that said, music is a luxury item. You should be happy with what you buy. And for the long term health of the music industry, fewer happy real fans are better than people who feel they've been ripped off. But the companies are all about how much money can I make off this artist today. And just how bad can their sales really be if Avril Lavigne can go quintuple platinum?
On the television side, the problem in the US is the completely outdated Neilsen ratings, the syndication market and its resulting ridiculous delay in getting programs released on dvd. You shouldn't have to wait YEARS to get a series on dvd.
The other problem is the total lack of respect the television stations themselves show their own programming. They do this by slapping advertisements for other programs across 1/4 of the screen. At a time when there are more and more options for entertainment, the stations are making watching their programs less and less enjoyable. And when was the last time you saw the end credits of a show air without being sped up and squished into a little box you can't even read, even if it were going slow to be able to? Shouldn't the giant box that comes up to tell me that I'm watching Friends be on during the ads that I see when I'm flipping, not when the show is actually on and I can see with my eyes that Friends is on? It doesn't make any sense at all, and it just keeps getting worse. I refuse to watch anything on FX because their ads are just so bad. So forget taping/tivoing the shows, it's getting to where you are going to have to download a wildfeed off the net if you want to actually enjoy the program at all.
I'll also say I got in trouble a couple years ago for posting a tv multimedia file on usenet. The thing is, it wasn't an episode. It was their own promotional material for their show. So I almost lost internet access and can't ever post anything there again because I promoted their show. This just goes to show how far removed the people/bots doing the reporting are removed from the actual producers of the shows, and from any common sense.
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