Bob Dylan on Free MP3 Downloading (you'll love this)

[NashVegas]

"Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

Bless his soul.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

1. You'd think he didn't get into it for the money...

What a concept.

[deadparrot]

2. Just another reason to love him.

:loveya:

[Radical Activist]

3. Stick that up your ass Metallica!

[Benfea]

6. Metallica's reaction really bothered me.

Many people don't understand the true context of Metallica's shenanigans.

You see, Metallica was the product of something in the 80s called the "Metal Underground." This was basically a pre-Internet Napster that involved people all over the world sending cassette copies to each other through the mail. These things were copies of copies of copies of garage-quality recordings. They sounded like shit, but we loved it because the music was really different and quite unlike anything you could hear on the radio. It was harder and faster than anything we'd ever heard before.

At the time, none of these bands were on any major record labels, but we loved them anyway. In time, we perversely came to distrust any band that sold a lot of records. Anyway, it was in this cocoon of fans isolated from the rest of the music industry that bands were able to really experiment, and the musical experimentation was prodigious. The Metal Underground is credited with creating more subgenres (speed metal, thrash metal, black metal) than any musical movement I can think of.

Little by little, the music industry noticed that there was a "new wave" of music burgeoning that they had no part of. Little by little they started picking up the more popular bands from the Metal Underground. You may have heard of some of them: Anthrax, Slayer, Pantera, and yes, Metallica.

Metallica owes the Metal Underground for its big break that got them onto a major label. They owe their careers to something that in essence was very similar to modern music-sharing networks. So for them to be involved with the Napster lawsuit was like biting the hand that feeds. Those of us who remember Metallica's pre-label history got pretty upset about the whole thing.

[Radical Activist]

7. Interesting

I'm not a huge metal fan so I didn't know all that. Now I think they are even bigger asshats.

[graywarrior]

4. Tis why I am IN LOVE with him.

sigh

[NashVegas]

5. I'm Not In Love With Him

But I love him for saying it.

Did you see the brouhaha in a thread a few days back, about guitar-tab sites being ordered down by publishers? Those who defend the industry practices decry "illegal theft" in downloading, yet can't wrap their brains around that what's being pushed is a forced economy. How Democratic!

Quote from the NYT article:

Mr. Keiser, of the Music Publishers’ Association, estimated that, including overhead costs, tablature could cost about $800 per song to produce, license and format for downloading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/technology/21ecom.html?pagewanted=2

User-driven tab sites make all that overhead unnecessary. Why do they get to keep their jobs when so many others across the country have lost theirs, to technology? Why is the paid transcripter so much more valuable than the medical diagnostics technician whose job was outsourced to India?