[WillowTheWhisp]

In the "olden days" (as my daughters refer to those long ago years when I was a teenager) I used to have a radio cassette player which was marketed with a view to you being able to make taped recordings of your favourite songs off Radio One. Hundreds, nay thousands of kids did it and nobody paid any royalties. What we did do though was go and buy an album so we could have the other songs that we couldn't get on the radio.

Nowadays we've got P2P and some people are copying whole albums so maybe albums sales are suffering as a result. But when I talk to people about what they download from P2P it tends to be stuff they can't get in the shops. There used to be a time when you could order oldies but when I tried recently (and the "oldie" was less than a year old even) I was told "Oh no, we don't do that. We move on to the new releases." so how does it possibly affect record sales if people are downloading older stuff?

I've argued the case too about people making video/DVD rcordings of TV programs. Machines exist for that very purpose, so that you can record something and watch it later. Are you then supposed to destroy it once you've watched it? How many times have you seen appeals going out (yes even from auntie BBC) for old videos of shows which they no longer have the originals of? If everyone had behaved themselves and destroyed the copies as soon as they'd been watched then a lot of classic TV would have been lost forever. There's an appeal going out at the moment for the "Reginald Molehusband" ad.

Instead of cutting off their noses to spite their faces the recording industry could try to make CDs more appealing. I remember when buying an album was something special because it has large illustrations, sometimes a poster, sometimes the whole thing was in booklet form. IF the CDs had something you couldn't possible get any other way then there would still be the appeal of spending money on one now and again. I haven't bought a CD in ages. I can't even remember what the last one I bought was. Probably something like whale music.

As for garages paying the PRS for the privilege of having the radio on at work where is that going to end? If you have a picnic in the countryside and some other family hears your radio should you have a PRS licence for that? How about cars passing you on the street and you hear a snatch of music from an open window?