FEAR FACTORY's HERRERA: 'I Don't Have A Problem With People Downloading Music'

FEAR FACTORY drummer Raymond Herrera recently spoke to Rock Confidential about illegal music downloading and the various ways in which artists try to make their product more appealing to the fans.

"Bands could have better packaging," he said. "Give people a better product, better artwork. The complete package has to be more than what they've been used to in the past. The other thing is the price of the music. I think that's the main reason for the downloading. If music was cheaper I think people would think twice about wanting to download it because you'd get better quality if you bought it. Most downloading is MP3. I don't have anything against MP3s because it's an easy way to move music across the Internet. The quality is just not there. Why spend $2-3-400,000 on a record if at the end of the day people are just going to download the MP3s? It's an insult as well. I think it's cool if you can go online and get music that you can't buy, like a lot of really old music that you can't get any more. That's a really great reason to have it on the Internet. New music that's not even out yet — to have it available on the internet to people for free, that's bad. Especially for the bands. That's what is killing the industry. It's not the other way around. I don't have a problem with people downloading music. People can do it all day long if they want. If it's not even out yet, that's what is killing bands. All of that makes us give the people a better product when it hits the stores. All we can do is create a better product at a better price. If people still don't want to go for that the next step will be just to sell music song by song. At that point you're getting rid of record labels, record stores. Ultimately bands could sell new songs online for one or two dollars. That's a whole different thing now. Maybe that's the way it will have to go down. I'm curious to see how it's going to pan out. The movie industry is freaking out as well because the same thing is happening to them as well. It's good and bad. It's good because it shows our technology. The bad thing is it hurts the people that are creating the product."

Read Raymond Herrera's entire interview with Rock Confidential at this location.