[Fyron]

All of my opinions on RIAA and music are based directly on "real world research," as are most peoples, even if indirectly. Please do not attempt to dismiss valid arguments with ad hominem attacks. Thanks.

The outlook is indeed bleak... RIAA complained about piracy driving profits down in 2000/2001, when the truth was that raw sales were down because they produced thousands fewer albums in those years by choice. Net profits were in fact up over previous years due to the reductions in production costs...

They produce thousands of talentless "artists" that give them more of the same tripe every year. Maybe if they started employing some quality standards and stopped trying to milk money off of every copycat of even mildly successful music trends each year, they wouldn't lose so much money on utter failures of "bands." But if they want to keep digging their collective graves, that's their problem.

The only difference between boycotting a media/software company over price gouging and other companies is that less scrupulous people can still acquire the "product" (how art can be denegrated to a "product" is beyond me, but I digress) while not purchasing it.

Your example of a Ferrari vs. Neon is irrelevant. There is no "budget" or "luxury" music... An interesting "real world fact" is that it is a lot cheaper to manufacture a CD than a cassette tape, yet CDs still cost more. Digital music downloads are even cheaper (bandwidth for a single quality-degraded album is trivial; SEnet could spend 0.19 cents per song at a generous size of 10 MB per song), yet a digital album costs the same as a physical CD, and they want to charge even more...

I (and many others) don't care so much how much money they make. I care that they are producing a very tiny amount of music amidst a deluge of filth and charging an insane rate for it, even for low cost digital downloads. I care that they are constantly attributing a decline in the indrustry to "piracy" (which it is most certainly not) when profits are at an all time high. Being blatantly lied to is not what I consider conducive to getting my money. I care that they are constantly trying to destroy my fair use rights to use legally purchased music however I want (non-commercially) and trying to prevent me from encoding music however I like so that I am not stuck with unusable formats in 5 or 10 years time (thank you DRM!). et cetra...