UK Illegal Downloaders Face Internet Ban!

I was sat watching News 24 earlier (it's probably one of the main channels I watch), when I saw this news story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm you may need to read this first for the rest to make sense.

Now, I am one of these terrible people who download music. I am also one of these people who BUY the albums I like after I've downloaded them. I bought so many albums last year by artists I had never heard of before! Threat Signal, Blinded Colony, Edge Of Sanity, Nightrage, even artists I've been listening to for a long time such as In Flames, Soilwork and my favourite band of all, Opeth, I found through downloading!

In fact, if it wasn't for my downloading habits, I doubt I'd be listening to half the bands I listen to today! I wouldn't own the majority of the CDs I own today, and I wouldn't be paying money to see these bands playing or buying their merchandise, because I would probably never would have found them otherwise!

Now I can understand that they're all upset when people download a new Kylie album, which would set you back all of £9.98, but unfortunatly, those of us who don't listen to radio friendly unit shifters (ah, managed to get a Nirvana reference in there) like Kylie, we will be the ones who suffer under this new "3 hits and you're out" proposal. It cost me £15 for my Threat Signal and Edge Of Sanity CDs, and when money is tight, and you don't want to be throwing that kind of cash at just anything, and these small bands on independent labels are REALLY going to struggle!

I'm still angry that metal albums cost so much more than those of more popular artists. I mean surely a CD costs the same to make either way? But I refuse to pay that amount of cash on a hunch I have about a band, before I hear the album! Hell I could be wasting £15 on the biggest amount of crap produced in the 21st Century, and I don't want to keep taking CDs back and swapping them because they're crap, I'll get banned from my own place of work!!!

But that is another rant for another day.

I would love to work out just how much money I have spent on the bands I have downloaded in the past on their CDs, tshirts/hoodies and gig tickets over the years. I'm sure it would add up to a very large amount of money! I mean there are plenty I've found without downloading through music magazines giving away free CDs, or listening to rock shows on the radio, but most of them I have found through downloading.

Even now, I am downloading new music from bands I'd never heard of before, to give them a try. If I like them, I will purchase them, if not, I will delete them. But I'd never heard of Charon or Theatre Of Tragedy until the other day. Theatre Of Tragedy I am pretty sure I will be buying after hearing a few of their tracks, but if I hadn't downloaded them, I would never have heard of them or contemplated buying anything by them.

So here is my little list of bands I have downloaded over the years, which I wouldn't have heard or bought stuff by otherwise. Note: I own CDs by all of these artists, albums I downloaded and others by them that I bought on the strength of the album I bought.

Opeth, In Flames, Soilwork, All That Remains, Threat Signal, Blinded Colony, Fear Factory, Edge Of Sanity, Guano Apes, Rammstein, Alice In Chains, Jerry Cantrell, Mark Lanegan, Tiamat, Scar Symmetry, Terror 2000, Coldseed, Nightrage, Nuclear Blast Allstars, Weezer, Spiritual Beggers, Factory 81, Mr Bungle, Faith No More, 36 Crazyfists, Lacuna Coil, Mad Capsule Markets... that is just a small handful of bands that I can think of off the top of my head. A lot of them I own ALL their albums (or the majority), a few I own their merchandise and quite a number I have seen (or want to see) live.

I don't always download. I do use Myspace a lot to look up bands and have a listen, but I find that a couple of tracks doesn't always show the bands in their best light, and they'll tend to put up tracks from their more recent stuff, or tracks they like a lot, rather than ones that sum up the band/artist as a whole.

If I were to become one of those banned from the internet for downloading music, and people like me who buy what they download and become fans of the bands, the industry will find they have more problems shifting these artists albums. And this in turn will be damaging for up and coming artists and their small independent labels who struggle enough as it is.