I donate lots of money monthly to my private music trackers because it's such a superior experience for music lovers, far better than Spotify and the like. I wish the labels would let these ecosystems emerge into the light, because I'd pay $100 a month for a legitimate version of Redacted...

Pedantic nitpick: it's not just music labels, but copyright trolls/racketeers in general; music is just the industry where it's most obvious/egregious.

Parasites exist on every industry. Left unchecked, they multiply and eventually kill the host.

Instead of pirating: support local artists, go to concerts, Bucky their march from the stalls and their self-pressed cds.

This is uninformed and off-topic.

How so?

Maybe labels are bad, but piracy is far worse for artists -- it reduces their incentive to produce. That's why, for instance, big bands have become such an endangered species. Almost nobody can afford to hire, say, a horn section today.

Big bands were essentially killed [0] by cheaper multitrack recording, synthesizers and samplers in the 80s, when there were no such things as torrent trackers. Even the wonderful although hugely inefficient Napster was more than a decade away. Today artists get most money from gigs, while record labels profit the most from printed music sales and royalties.

[0] The correct term should be "relegated to niche performances". If you love big bands you can indeed listen to them somewhere today, the difference being that mostly for economical reasons they're not anymore the default method used for example to make a film score.

> Big bands were essentially killed by cheaper multitrack recording, synthesizers and samplers

Excellent point.