Filesharing victims: rich companies
Gun crime victims: poor people

Now as you see priorities are perfectly justified.

While I understand why Bloodshot are saying what they’re saying, they haven’t actually supplied any evidence that downloading costs them sales (they’re committing the popular content industry fallacy of assuming that people who download things that are free would otherwise have paid for them). Indeed, given that they’re a tiny label with limited distribution who’ll get stiffed compared to the majors in production, sales and marketing costs, I’d be amazed if a revenue maximising strategy for them wouldn’t be to sell un-DRMed MP3s on their website for cheap and accept a small increase in sales combined with a massive increase in people listening to illicit copies.

Dan: your mate with the Shampoo royalties presumaby got a writing credit (this would make sense, given that the riff pretty much made the song. Wasn’t his name Con, Com, or something? – yes, post-Googling it was Con Fitzpatrick and he co-wrote the songs…). This is admittedly a way in which bands make money despite not getting payback on their record deals; however, the vast majority of the cash he gets will be from radio play rather than record sales.

First, those who are living off unrecoupable advances from the majors only got those advances because someone was willing to take a punt on them selling lots of CDs or paid downloads in the future. If the environment changes so that fewer such sales are expected, then there will be fewer advances paid.

Second, there are plenty of artists signed to independent small labels whose royalties do represent the marginal difference between surviving as musicians or just jacking it all in. See

http://www.bloodshotrecords.com/faq/#board_2558

for an argument to this effect.

And have a listen to Gillian Welch’s Everything is Free while you’re pondering the subject.