Tuesday 3 November 2009

Music companies embrace illegal downloads

New research has shown that the same people who download the most music illegally are also spending the most money on legal music purchases, prompting a massive turn-around in some music executives' positions on file-sharing.

Whereas previously most music labels have done everything in their power to crack down on users sharing mp3 files of songs they haven't paid for, now industry moguls are now starting to see some serious potential in the idea of allowing their product to be downloaded illegally. Many are actively encouraging customers to upload ripped copies of their CDs to the internet, and some are even pushing for legislation mandating a certain level of bittorrent bandwidth every month.

"It's always been obvious that most illegal downloads can't be counted as lost sales," said Abercrombie Jaxtable, a spokesman for DLH Records, in a statement released earlier this week. "But to learn that they can in fact equate to a positive source of revenue was a surprise, and has prompted this change in policy. We now urge consumers to download as much content released on our label as they can find, wherever it's available."

"Let's face it," he went on, "everyone's downloading everything for free anyway, so any individual not also stealing our stuff may be unfairly damaging our profits, and we may seek to take legal action against them."

Some logicians have been seen trying to explain to these record companies the difference between correlation and causation, but were immediately told by everybody else on the internet to shut up before they ruined everything.

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