He advocated recording a new and unreleased song Maiden were playing in the 2003 GMETID tour to advertise the new album and explicitly asked people to buy the album if they liked the song. He certainly did not advocate illegal P2P sharing of entire albums. There is a major difference here; he certainly wasn't naive, but he appealed to people's support. Back then, I think, he believed that this still worked. BNW sold 2 million physical copies, DoD 1.5. TFF sold 523,000. Is it so hard to understand that Bruce may have developed his opinion on this over the last 15 years?
Of course Bruce knew that in Brazil, albums were mostly spread through bootlegs. But the AOB tour was in 1997, before Napster even existed. Back then, it was inconveivable that people would be able to download music in such masses as it later happened, and would do so in countries where the albums were commercially available. But we are also talking about countries like the US, UK or Germany, where anyone can pick up a CD at a local store at any given time; and in these countries, people illegally download in highly significant masses.
Nobody claims that, and I don't see anywhere in the quote that Bruce was talking about the MP3 format as such. He talked about people not paying for the music today. He said Napster started it, but it is still going on today, in much larger scale than in the heyday of Napster.
Yes, but the quality of it became different with P2P sharing clients and broadband connections. In 1999, it took me an hour to download a five-minute song. Now I can download ten albums in half an hour. Before 1999, people either shared albums on low-quality tapes, which more often than not made people buy an album they liked when the tape was worn out or they had the cash, or through CD-Rs, in a time when CD burners were not common and very expensive. There were people making money selling burnt CDs, but this was a niche. Today, anyone with a decent internet connection can simply download an album for free in the same quality [Yes, not exactly the same quality, but most people don't care] as they would otherwise buy for much money on a CD. Yes, people also pay for streaming and MP3 downloads, but I would wager that artist's incomes does not even remotely reach the levels of the age of physical releases.
I really don't understand why it's so hard to believe that musicians experienced a breakdown in income when filesharing on the internet became widespread. What is so difficult about understanding this?
