this is a little curiosity, so please indulge me.
a hell of a lot of you download music off the net. don't deny it, i can see you hiding back there.
now the thought struck me. everyone who downloads music hates the RIAA. there are good reasons for this. suing 12 year olds tends to annoy people. shops charging £15 for a cd where less than 20p of that goes to the artists is, undoubtedly, bad.
for the sake of argument, if you could, would you pay an artist 50p for an album? not the record industry, not the promoters, not the wholesalers, not the distributors, not the high street. if your money went to the band that played the music, would you pay it? 50p is a lot more than they get from their record labels, so it certainly wouldn't be cheap of you to do so
so i want to know: if you could, would you skip the middlemen?
and no, i'm not encouraging piracy, i'm just saying "if pirate music managed somehow to get into your posession, would you pay a pittance to the artist to thank them?"