There’s a feature on my music promotio site about this very subject http://mymusicsuccess.com/feature_free.html

“The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that those who downloaded “free” music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would make music pirates the industry’s largest audience for digital sales.”

This could have been an opportunity to show the viability of file-sharing as a promotional tool that is actually quite effective in encouraging higher sales of digital music.

“Everybody knows that music sales have continued to fall in recent years, and that filesharing is usually blamed. We are made to imagine legions of internet criminals, their fingers on track-pads, downloading songs via BitTorrent and never paying for anything. One of the only bits of good news amid this doom and gloom is the steady rise in digital music sales. Millions of internet do-gooders, their fingers on track-pads, who pay for songs they like – purchasing them from Amazon or iTunes Music Store. And yet according to new research, these two groups may be the same.”

Marketing people of course will see this as an opportunity, I see it as a pitfall, either you fight it, or you submit to it and morph with it to the outcome that it will become, and try to make that outcome a benefit. I think the outcome of what is being suggesting, could in fact be a positive one, however at what cost?

If you start down the slippery slope of making it OK or “acceptable” on all levels, then where does that leave the owner of the intellectual property on their property that they DIDN’T want shared? Where are this persons rights as the creator and or owner?
We have this issue with “programs”, “movies”, “artwork”, the written word, all over the internet. “Copyright infringement”, simply means that the owner of the work has the right to allow or NOT allow this to happen with their property.
If you make it “OK” or the “accepted norm” to just offer anyones intellectual property for free to everyone, how is that going to effect their rights down the road?

This is what you have to ask yourself, I have absolutely no problem with Torrents making available materials that have been given to them via the proper entities to market for free, these sites could even make money with advertising rather than just run at a loss doing this (which is of course what they were hoping to do with their Amazon Affiliation fee’s) They could do it on a much bigger basis if they were legit business’ rather than fly by night operations working illegally. Myspace is making a killing on advertising because they chose to embrace this concept the correct way.