Music Industry

1.Although universities have worked to prevent the illegal transfer of music downloading on college campus, it is still a growing problem. Most of it stems from the students perspective that the transfer of music is harmless and until students have taken some type of ethical course, they cannot see the ramifications of their actions. They don’t think too much about the ethical and legal problems but just want to spend less money to enjoy more music. And some students may share them music to the others because of “friendship”. There are some students who have the mentality that the artist makes too much money, so they won’t miss the one dollar for this song. However, if 1 million students did that across the nation with at least 2 songs a week it would cost the artist at least 2 million a week. This is just one week and when you multiply that for one year, this artist is losing a lot of money. In China, the illegal transfer of music is very serious. Most of the music is free on the internet. Nowadays, more music need to pay on internet but there are many people spread free download resources. I think this phenomenon occurs because Chinese are lack of the copyright protection consciousness. And music is less tangible so it is hard to know exactly how may illegal downloads happened a week if there was not a way to track it.

2. I do not believe payola should be allowed, because it’s an unequal competition to promote the label’s music and it can lead to a monopoly in the music industry. If payola was allowed, the big music labels could decide which music to be played on the radio. In this way, the radio station would probably play the music that could bring them most money instead of the music that is really good. This would make it difficult for some small labels or independent music labels to promote music because they can’t provide the large amount of money to the radio station. Under the circumstances, it’s not good for the

development of music and also destroy the diversity. Some singers or musicians who are not well-known can hardly promote their music on the radio. And customers don’t know how the radio stations determined what songs were selected to be played on the air. Payola prevents the "true" distribution of musical preferences from reaching the airwaves. Listeners maybe listen to the music that they would prefer less to what they have heard due to payola.

3. I think at first Eliot Spitzer was simply being curious about how music labels promoted their music to radio stations and from there he felt as though an injustice was taking place after his discovery. Maybe his curiosity came from reading an article about payola and its effects in the 70’s and 80’s, but the case does not mention how the “age-old question” came to him. I think once he began requesting documentation from the four major record label companies, he became shocked. He probably realized how much money was being