See this great post which reinforces the inconvenient truth that devastating damage is being done to contemporary artists by those who pirate and those who enable & profit from piracy.
Letter by David Lowery
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After you've read the main article,
One of the best comments i found concerning the letter.
Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams)
June 18, 2012 at 9:10 am
The amazing lack of self-awareness coupled with apparent moral blindness is what I find most galling. College kids copying music — whatever the increased in ease and volume — is not new. 20 years ago, I smuggled rare LPs out of the radio station library and took them back to my dorm room to tape. But the assumption that anything that can be taken for free should be, and that figuring out how to get paid for their work is the artists’ problem, has gone from a guilty secret to an open assumption. (Practically speaking, it of course *is* an artist’s problem how to make their vocation financially sustainable, but a little help from the people making off with their work would be nice.) The most telling aspect of the NPR piece to me is the fact that the question of how artists would be more fairly compensated by some Spotify-like future service is reduced to a parenthetical aside, clearly falling into the area of “not my problem.” What I don’t understand is this: If you a) enjoy art, and b) would like more of it, why are you not willing and indeed eager to help the artists whose work you enjoy? I do think it’s more of a cultural problem than a generational one: Students who’ve never had to support themselves financially are inevitably less sensitive to the value of a dollar — I doubt 35K a year without benefits means much to them yet — but the US has across the board become a winner-take-all culture, where failure to exploit every available loophole makes you not moral but a sucker. What we see in younger generations is merely the concentrated version of what we have allowed our country to become.
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