Music piracy on increase worldwide: industry group

Yeah but, the real pirates are the producers and record labels. Most musicians receive a pittance of the royalties from their music.

This article could have been written 15 years ago.

Recorded content is just 0's and 1's.

Musicians make their money performing. As Disillusioned said, the real pirates are the record companies. I don't care about record companies.

Is this a memo from 2005? I hardly know anyone who downloads music.

I agree with dissalusioned. Artists who have a passion for music preform. Music companies exploit. Just look at J-POP girl and boy bands.

"With the wealth of licensed music available to fans, these types of illegal sites have no justifiable place in the music world," 

Really? I must be unique in that I often cannot buy the music of my favorite (but less popular) artists because sales are restricted to the USA and the Japanese companies can't be bothered to handle any band with less than massive sales. There is often literally no way to compensate the artist for their recording. And, as others have said, even when I am able to buy the recording, the artist gets less than a dime on the dollar.

And record companies have the nerve to call the fans "pirates." We know who the real pirates are.

This article does not make sense. I will openly admit I've downloaded live concert movies from YouTube and ripped the audio to load onto my iPhone. I also have them stored on hard disc and watch them from time to time. I haven't used any pirated software at all. It's all open source software readily available to anyone. Google Chrome and FireFox browsers have built in YouTube download apps. All video editing software has the option to remove the audio track and save it. Is it the end-user who is breaking the law or those who allow this kind of software and apps to be freely used by anyone? As I previously mentioned, it is only the record labels who are peeved coz they are not getting their cut.

Musicians make their money performing.

Sadly not true for a majority of musicians in Japan. Anyone who's been involved with performing here will be aware of the "noruma" or "pay to play system" where to play in even the smallest of venues will cost a band upwards of $200 and audiences will have to pay between $15-25 to see a short list of unknown bands. It guarantees that venues make hundreds of dollars every night while the musicians themselves are left out of pocket.

Venues here are just as greedy and self-serving as the record labels.

The authors appear to be confusing two different things here. First they say stream ripping is used to access "pirate content", then they say that the content being ripped is on Spotify and YouTube. But I don't think Spotify has any "pirate content" and YouTube is supposed to remove it when it is reported.

You don't need sites such as YouTube-mp3.org to download YouTube video and audio: there are plenty of free programs that will do the same. If the audio and video can be played on your computer I can't see how it is possible to stop the files from being saved somehow. And how is saving the file any different from buffering?

I sometimes save YouTube videos so that I can watch them without all the pop-ups obscuring them. I couldn't care less about the whining of the IFPI.