Music downloading is it good or bad?

Products of the intellect take no less resources to create than tangible goods. In this case, creating a song takes time, energy, investments (gear, guitar lessons, education in music, etc), and even risk (not knowing if the resources you spend on creating music will pay off).

It's really no different.

QFT
 
I find nothing wrong in dowloading a fairly popular band's music. However, if the band is obscure, it always feels good to support them by buying their CD's.
 
Products of the intellect take no less resources to create than tangible goods. In this case, creating a song takes time, energy, investments (gear, guitar lessons, education in music, etc), and even risk (not knowing if the resources you spend on creating music will pay off).

It's really no different.

This is a fairly typical argument, but it seems to me to be beside the point when trying to determine the legitimacy of intellectual property itself. In fact, I would go so far to say that it does not at all answer the question as to why intellectual property/monopoly is justified; instead it puts forth a purely utilitarian position--e.g. Q: "Is IP a legitimate form of property?" A: "Well people labour to create it and they derive benefit from it, so yes, it is legitimate".

See what I mean? There is no actual justification of IP itself being put forth.
 
Although I can say that without downloading, I would only be listening to a fraction of the bands that I do today...I don't think anyone can really justify downloading. The bottom line is that the negative far outweighs the positive regardless of you look at it.

I think if the ability to download music was taken away, I would be fine with that if bands would allow fans to stream albums entirely. Some bands do, and I think that's a fair trade off.

But targeting people who download, well, that's like the police arresting the guy who bought the drugs and not the drug dealer. There's an infinite amount of sites out there who blatantly upload music. People are still chasing after torrent sites, when for several years now, blogspot sites and filehosting have been far more guilty.

I buy CDs regularly, but most of them are bought used through ebay etc. The bands will not benefit at all from me buying used albums any more than they will from me downloading them. There's no music shops in my city anymore and besides, loud new albums and remastered albums (products of their cheap marketing ploys) sound bad.

And Lars is an absolute hypocrite. When they released their Death Magnetic album, a new landmark in the loudness war being an absolutely horrendously produced album he told people to "deal with it" and that that was how albums were produced these days. If I recall correctly, I don't think he took it too kindly when people told him to "deal with it" when it came to illegal filesharing years ago.

The "loudness war" is just another classic example of the music industry's short-term thinking screwing fans over in the process (like myself, who are actually willing to pay for music) and in the long-run themselves, when no one will want to buy an album that sounds like pure shit. Things are getting worse and people are becoming more aware of the issue so that won't bode to well for them in the end. Maybe they should try and fix what they are doing wrong first...
 
I have the definitive answer to this topic: Just ask every musician individually if they are ok with it.

Some will like the idea cause they get exposure and play live
Some won't like the idea cause the already have exposure and lose money
Some will like the idea cause they already have exposure but want to have more
Some won't like the idea cause they don't have exposure, but don't want to give their music for free.

More or less this, if you download music and say you are "helping" those guys, you don't know it, and have 25% chance of actually doing it, or maybe 50%, don't know, you have to ask them.