Unless you're recording your music on 4-tracks at home, it costs money to produce an album, with an engineer and a producer at the helm. Where does that money come from? The record companies who want to ensure the bands sound as good as possible. They also spend money to market the albums. And they front the money in a lot of cases, for touring. They are doing this in the hope the record sells and the band becomes successful.

It's the same as the book industry. Random House sends me an advance for a book I've written. They hope it becomes the next Harry Potter, but there are very few of those. the Harry Potter books actually fund the new novelists, just as the Lady Gaga's are creating an economy where a record industry can invest in a new artist.

It's not happening as much as it used to, and the music is sucking more than it used to. And the people to blame aren't the record industry which has been continuously taking a loss the past ten years. the people to blame are the people who aren't investing in the artists, i.e. buying their music or books.

You steal music, the industry suffers and that means companies and musicians and producers and engineers, and people who make album covers for a living and anyone tangentially tied to the industry. You aren't killing off Sony, you're destroying an entire economy.

No one gains anything except Google because they sell ad space on pirate sites, and people like kim dot com, who made BILLIONS by exploiting artists who saw no money at all.

You do not need a fucking degree in economics to understand this concept.