Issues and Debates within the music industry: PIRACY

One of BBC’s headlines was “online music piracy destroys local music”. It stated that the sales of albums by local artists have fallen by 65% in the last five years. Sites such as BitTorrent, Limewire, Kazaa, Rapidshare and many more all contribute to allowing people to download musical content for free.

One spokesperson said “If children were to lose their internet connection, they would stop downloading off all these sites and this will reduce piracy”. This is true to a certain extent because people want good quality music and if they can get it for free then that is a bonus. However, before downloading sites and software came about, people used to copy and burn CD’s over and again, Tape music videos that came on TV, tape music from radio stations, and even go as far as pausing the recording when the DJ would cut in, then resuming the recording when their favourite song came on. This was done by many people before internet was around and is still a form of piracy. Even though it wasn’t the best way to get good quality music, it was a way of consumers getting their favourite music for free. Music artists aren’t fond of piracy because it puts their profit at stake as they are losing out on purchases of their singles and albums. However some artists may not have a huge problem with music piracy as they can make a lot of money from endorsements and tours, and if you are a popular artist such as Beyonce, people will pay hundreds and thousands to see you on tour, and you will still be making money from that. Prince gave away his last official album as a way of advertising himself to the population, this still brings money in for him as an artist because more and more people are recommending him to friends and he is constantly becoming more known.

Graph showing the rate of Piracy increasing between 2008-2010

Sites such as Rapidshare, Megaupload and Megavideo account for 21 billion visits per year showing that piracy is still very big and will carry on to be for a very long time as it is virtually impossible to stop in all forms. Even though some downloading sites do get shut down after a while, new ones are always opening, even where you can do it online without software by typing a URL link into a YouTube to MP3 converter.

Another headline from the Guardian said “Piracy continues to cripple music industry as sales fall 10%”. This shows that the rise of new services such as Spotify and legal ‘crackdowns’ on online pirating failed to stop the tumbling music sales. Spotify is a music streaming service offering unlimited streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels. You can listen to the music however many times you like, but if you want to download it to put onto an MP3 player or your phone, you have to pay. This software regulation was put in place in order to help beat piracy, however it doesn’t have much of an effect on consumers because there will still always be so many sites and software that will allow you to download music for free, and even sell it onto others for a cheaper price, which is illegal, but you aren’t likely to be caught and will cause others to be victims of pirated content.