A nit with your nit re. my nit :)
I guess I can see the importance of the distinction, insofar as the majority of artists against file sharing have little direct ownership over their music. That's an interesting thing I haven't considered. Though, on ArtistLaunch there are a lot of artists who are very much against file sharing... and I even wrote an article that got posted on Slashdot about how Napster was "bad" (archived on my own site, [link|http://baptistdeathray.dtcweb.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7|http://baptistdeathr...viewtopic.php?t=7]), though I was really talking about the "music wants to be free" movement that was growing around Napster. I had no real problem with Napster per se.
In my own experience, a lot of musicians seem to want to trade their music until they can "make it," and then they want the trading to STOP, and they want everyone to buy everything. That seems a bit inconsistent.
From my own perspective, Pandora's box is open -- unlike the Greek myth, music swapping has advantages, just like tape-swapping did. The only practical solution is to get the music swapping community to be amenable to supporting the artists they like. To do this, the big-name bands and their labels are going to have to change some of the ways they do business. For one thing, they're going to have to freaking lower their CD prices. Your average CD costs $16 a pop, and "average" CDs are rarer and rarer these days. That's just... stupid, and that stupidity is just more fuel to the fire for the more radical elements of the online music trading venue.
Ooops, I'm ranting again... time to get more coffee.
