well, filmcomposers "stole" from stravinsky... so what... stravinsky himself stole from other great composers... just an example: his idea of bitonality that is very explicitely elaborated in the rite of spring... he stole it from maurice ravel. but guess what: he made it his own. that is what a great composer does... he steals and makes it his own... stravinsky himself said: a good composer does not borrow, he steals.... there is nothing wrong with stealing or ripping off... it is in the way you do it. sure, there is a lot of bad filmmusic out there, maybe even the vast majority (just like in concert music, btw), but saying in general, that filmmusic ist just a huge rip-off, shows that you don´t know that much about the people who are being ripped off... go back to uni...
@ william: thanks for that post... it was one of the wittiest i´ve ever read here...
p.s.: the way you are dissing "functional" music is inherently stupid. stravinsky himself wrote a lot of functional music (i.e. ballets). opera music is also functional (many film composers do also steal from operas). actually you could say that opera is the predecessor of film in a way (200 years ago, star wars would have been an opera, not a movie!). it is just a different medium... there have been many bad operas in the last 400 years and there have been many bad filmscores in the past 80 years... but the best did and will survive... it has always been like that.
concerning your complaint about the lack of originality in filmscoring: do you know that there is not even one single original idea in the plays of shakespeare? all of his plays have been written before, more than 1000 years before his time, but noone wrote them like he did... there are also filmcomposers who can do a similar thing, but you will only find it if you are openminded enough...