Impossible.

“It’s like there was a great town square, [...]”

That is absolutely not the case. The Internet is not a central location for users to enter and leave. Comparing the Internet to a physical space just shows your incompetence in understanding abstract concepts. Assuming the average person, how does one “steal” anything that is already there? If something is stolen, then there must be something lost. What has been lost? How do you prove the loss? Speculation is not acceptable. If you were to choose to use mathematics, you must collect sufficient data; otherwise you are utterly making things up.

“Technology is not the problem, that’s just more rationalization and a way to avoid personal responsibility for what you do.”

Technology is an application of science. Obviously, it is not something to scapegoat if the technology was designed to perform specific functions completely irrelevant to the matter.

“Technology is neutral, it can be used for good or for evil – it’s up to the individual.”

Your statement is also a subjective generalization. Technology is not something that has personal preference.

“Technology enables someone with the right ability to steal thousands of bank account numbers.”

Technology also enables thwarting that ability.

“Does that make it OK? According to your logic, yes because the bank has a ‘bad business model’.”

And how is this relevant? Unlike you guys, banks are not fighting against technological advancements. Have you not noticed what is call “Online Banking”?

Your arguments just suck, malgre.

Technology is not the problem, that’s just more rationalization and a way to avoid personal responsibility for what you do. Technology is neutral, it can be used for good or for evil – it’s up to the individual.

Technology enables someone with the right ability to steal thousands of bank account numbers. Does that make it OK? According to your logic, yes because the bank has a ‘bad business model’.

As far as the number of releases goes, the number of records released increasing like that is due to two things that happened in the late 90′s, one was that cd’s got really cheap to replicate in bulk and a lot of new fabs opened up, and the other was that recording got cheap thanks to computing power, and cheap imports from china. etailing had a lot to do with that too. Now it’s pretty common to release in hardcopy and in the electronic market at the same time, releasing electronically adds next to no cost.

But what I’m saying precisely is that it doesn’t matter that there are more releases, becuase those releases altogether are making half as much money. Artists are making less money. Less money off of recordings. So saying that there are more recordings is a red herring, it doesn;t mean the industry is healthy. It just means it’s really cheap to make a recording. Rel;easing a cd is cheaper and easier than renting an apartment or buying a car, and that wasn’t always true. I’m not complaining about that, it’s just not a statistic that can be used to show the health of the industry.

At the same time, not to beat a deads horse, there are fewer and fewer venues to play in every year – a trend that started in the 1970′s actually. Some people have argued that the health of the music industry as a whole is somewhat related to that decline, but I’m not so sure.

So saying that the industry has grown in any way would be an error. It hasn’t, it has shrunk. So twice as many albums being released at say, ten percent of the cost (or something like that) just means that albums are cheaper to release. The industry altogether, majors, indies, all of it, is half the size it was a decade ago.

Now granted, that doesn’t include all the corporations that make money directly and indirectly off of file sharing, for instance, advertising money that would go to an artists website instead of a p2p search engine, and all the companies making money off of sharing like ISP’s charging more for the high-bandwidth accounts that people use to share, ad impressions on google, forums, the venture capital going to torrent software, etc, all hard to quantify but probably at least as much money in all that as there used to be in the music business – just none of it goes to the people making the music, the musicians and the people that work for them.

And why on earth do you need to pay an mp3 distributor?

Sigh.