Music For Pirates
WORDS: Yasmin Begum (Youth Editorial Group)
Music piracy is a hotly debated subject between musicians, fans and record companies alike. With the rise of peer-to-peer servers and the dawning of the age of the Internet, it's easier than ever to pirate music. Modems are faster, with many internet providers boasting about their fiber optic broadband.
Are you a culprit? Do you have, say, Limewire (pictured) on your computer, or a file converter? Have you accepted copied albums or burnt mix CDs from friends? Some statistics have even said that up to 90% of students have illegally downloaded music onto their computer, making almost everyone a culprit. As they say, you can 'click but you can't hide'. Internet piracy costs the industry billions of dollars each year, with profits nosediving at seven percent annually since 2000.
It's interesting to see that when 'music was dying' previously back in the eighties, the preferred method of sharing music was by tapes. On a twin-deck cassette player you could easily make duplicate copies of tapes, with many independent artists initially releasing their albums through this method, notably the quirky singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) went as far to mark all music releases with a logo consisting of a tape and crossbones, a satire of the pirate flag with a slogan that screamed 'Home Taping is Killing Music'.
Many bands hit back. In 1981, infamous punk rock band the Dead Kennedys hit back on their release of In God We Trust Inc printed, 'Home taping is killing big business profits, we left this side [of the casette] blank so you could help!' Other organisations based in America went as far to make slogans Piracy Is Theft, a satire on Proudhon's Property Is Theft (Proudhon was an anarchist!).
Over the past few years there's been a considerable increase in pirated media with the rise of the anti-copyright movement. A central anti-copyright argument is that copyright has never been of net benefit to society, and instead serves to enrich a few at the expense of creativity.
In May of 2006, Swedish bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay was busted by the cops, where they confiscated the entire catalogue and indexes of the zip files on their servers. This wasn't all the Swedish police took; their entire computer equipment stockade was taken from them. The entire sever was shut down. The Pirate Bay intially started off as the Pirate Bureau, and now gets up to two million visitors per day, where users can download a compressed zip files and convert them using a programme such as BitLord or Utorrent where, depending on the amount of 'seeds', you can download an album in as little as ten minutes. Do you think that this is wrong?
There's a question that begs to be asked: is it wrong to kill the music industry? The same record companies that rip off the musicians we love, taking huge profits from music sales? The same music industries that charge extortionate fares for CDs, vinyl, online albums and, more importantly, live music? The great irony here is that the company's worst enemy is in fact their consumers. You can be expected to pay up to £30 to see live bands/artists play, and ticket prices for larger acts such as Madonna and Bruce Springsteen have gone up to £150.
Smaller bands, however, have actively encouraged pirating their music and urged fans to see them live and buy merchandise, as this cuts out the middle man and the profits directly benefit the band. Live music is the best revenue stream for performers.
As far as I'm concerned, the sooner the record companies die, the better.
For more info on this controversial subject, check out The Pirate Bay's Steal This Film.
