FILTER's RICHARD PATRICK On Illegal Downloading: Fans Of Music Have Got To Pay For It

August 31, 2002

FILTER frontman Richard Patrick has no love for individuals engaging in illegal music downloading on the Internet and feels that the continuation of the current downloading trend could ultimately have disastrous consequences on the music industry.

"There's an instrument you can use to find out how many times something's been swapped," Patrick told Kerrang! magazine recently. "Eight thousand downloads and 80,000 files have happened already [presumably referring to the new FILTER album, The Amalgamut—ed]. That's money right out of our pocket. This is a $300 hotel room [referring to room he was staying in at the time of the interview—ed.], and this is cheap for us. Being in a band is incredibly expensive. Imagine you walk into a store, and there's a guy selling cheeseburgers. If you grab that cheeseburger and walk out, you'd be arrested. But when you download some files and you get the whole record for free, that's intellectual theft. There are people out there who check out one song, really like it an then go out and guy the whole record. But in American colleges it's quite the cool thing to burn off a ton of CDs. It would mean we can't afford to go on and we break up. It's that simple. If you're fans of music and you care about the bands, you've got to pay for it."

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