Music Piracy And The End Of Culture
This guest post is by Charlotta Hedman (@fjoms), a journalist who blogs for the Music 4.5 project, a series of events that bring together people from the technology and the music industry.
The music industry seems to be bracing itself for peak-revenue in the same way the rest of the world is waiting for the oil to run out. Is it really true that piracy will turn some countries into a cultural wasteland? According to some reports it's already happening. In Spain where downloading isn't illegal album sales by local artists have dropped 65 percent in recent years. It's gloomy news for an industry who's become so dependent on what now seems like an archaic business model. IFPI isn't happy and believes that global legislation is needed for the industry's survival.
But will more legislation work? Prohibition is rarely successful and there are geeks out there who will fight tooth and nail to keep the downloads going. Recent reports at Torrentfreak also show that even though the RIAA sent out over two million copyright infringement notices during the last two years, but the effects on file-sharing levels have been unnoticeable.
Legal downloads are stalling
What the industry needs is a new direction. Something that will work for those who've grown used to getting their music and movies for free. Streaming services have had an impact on illegal downloading in countries like the UK, but according to Business Week the percentage of legal downloads have now stalled.
Research by Nielsen SoundScan shows that downloads of songs to iPods, computers and other devices grew with just 0.3 percent during this year. And even worse, the downloading of ring-tones (which brought the industry $714 million in 2007) have fallen 24 percent.
It might be time for the industry to adopt a new digital strategy, but what? Maybe they can follow in the footsteps of the ailing newspapers and start selling clothes hangers (like The Telegraph in the UK).
New consumer habits
But there might be another way. Apparently audiences are more inclined to tune into intelligent streaming-services like Pandora. Too much choice leads to people wanting new ways of discovering good music. When every single song ever made seems to be available online, we might need some help finding what we like.
The question is if people even want to own music anymore. Do we really need all those CDs or mp3s taking up space on our shelves or on our hard-drives? Especially when we can just tune into a digital service and get access to any of the songs we like instantly.
Too late to fight piracy?
The downloads of pirated music are still growing. In countries like Spain and Sweden where piracy is rife a lot of people think it's silly to pay for music, when it's so easy to get it for free.
Even the music industry are realizing it might be too late to fight piracy. Francis Keeling, the vice president for Universal Music, has said it isn't possible to stop piracy, but that the industry needs to make it socially unacceptable. Is it a problem that will be tackled in the same way as smoking then? It's been possible to ban smoking from public places and therefore reduce the incentive to pick up a cigarette. It's not going to be as easy to control the internet. Smoking also costs people money, downloading songs doesn't.
The music industry is trying to compete with a market that can provide their products for free. If audiences have had a taste of not paying, that's what they're going to keep looking for. The Money Saving Expert, Martin Lewis, told Torrentfreak that music companies need to wake up and embrace the price competition.
Piracy will hardly lead to a cultural apocalypse. There are already indie artists producing their own movies and music and sharing it for free. We're not running out of culture, just the money to pay for it. But record labels and artists need to remember that there still are people consuming their products out there. And where there's an audience there's also a target market. Now we just need to figure out how to entice them to spend money again.
we’re a decade past peak revenue.
What about guilt? You know the type of ad; a picture of the artist looking forlorn and a sympathetic voice-over, “For just £2 a month you could support (insert artist’s name) in their endeavours to make sense of the world now that all political & religious idealogies have spectacularly failed.”
Might be worth a try?
…..they’re so desperate they can’t even type ideologies correctly 😉
No offense, but Spain and much of the non-European countries are considered a wasteland, even in the days of CD’s.
Sad.
This was really bad. USA Today type bad. Nothing new, lots of generalizations, and an inflammatory title you don’t defuse until the last paragraph. Blogging by numbers stuff.
Seriously, why would you want to put this in front of the Hypebot audience? What were you contributing with this?
@Luis – haha. But really, one thing Europe had back in the day was a serious patron system. I mean kings and queens, governments, or the church giving money to artists to create for their courts. That’s how Mozart, Beethoven, Shostakovich, all made money. Beyond that, Tchaikovsky made a bunch of money by revolutionizing music for ballet, which, at the time, was just making the transition from vulgar art to high art. He paved the way for Stravinsky and they all made their bones by being exceptional. Maybe what we have to do is not look to recent history, but look way, way, back.
The solution for the music industry is so simple but my inner realist knows it might never happen. The future of music should embrace file sharing and try to monetize that versus attacking it. Let’s go out on a limb here and say file sharing should be made legal. Not in a way that enables illegal activity but in a way the labels can embrace new ideas of how music can reach a fan. The answer comes with the ISPs. If the labels, publishers, copyright holders could actually agree on some sort of model with the ISPs it could be revolutionary. There could be versions of software that charge the ISPs for every time a user shares a song. The more a user shares the more of a kickback they get from the labels. Increasing music sharing while having a monetized model would be ideal but I doubt any major label would ever embrace such forward thinking.
*Hat Tip
Richard, you really can’t go back in time to patron payments. Who cares.
Plus, do your research. All these old farts made tons off of publishing. Beethoven was an amazing businessman doing one-offs with music companies. He had the power to do that.
Your forgetting his endorsement deal, he was one of the first composers to be endorsed by a piano company.
The patron system is alive – they’re called venture capitalists now. Ingenious has a healthy history of investing into music projects it thinks will make money. There are also rich individuals who back artists they think will be successful, or even just to extend culture. Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead has a long history of backing modern music composers.
I second the comment that this is a load of crap generalisations with no backup. One of them is that you can listen to anything you want on stream services. In the past 2 days alone I have tried to listen to INXS and Bob Dylan on Spotify. They aren’t there – certainly not the albums that made them famous.
Charlotte, before writing contentious headlines and nearly-thought commentary, do your homework and bring some intelligence to the process.
There is a simple technical solution to piracy: Malware. Malware already exists that can disable your computer and evade all the standard security programs like Norton or Malwarebytes. At present, the worst kinds of malware are spread mainly through porn sites, but music file-sharing networks are ideal for the purpose. A computer engineer told me recently that file-sharing is increasingly used by cyber-fraudsters for spreading malware. If the music biz (or individual wealthy artists) decided to sponsor malware production, file-sharing would become even more hazardous, and the amount of piracy would be drastically reduced. At present they are not doing this, probably for fear of legal action, but the time may come.
My girlfriend does not buy music anymore because she can find every song she’s interested in on youtube for free. And youtube is a corporate provider since the google takeover. So would the label industry be willing to joing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in its hunt after google? Probably not.
Your solution would be as effective as trying to stop drug usage by selling tainted product. Sure, you’ll get a few – but it won’t be long until the word is out on the street, and people would be avoiding you like the plague.
Most modern F2P sites contain a comment section for each torrent, allowing downloaders to report their experience. If people find malware in the downloaded file, you can bet the number of people sharing it will disappear in short order. If there’s nobody sharing it, nobody will download it, and whoever added that torrent would be quickly avoided.
Also, just like the drug reference – just because you’re sharing a tainted product, it doesn’t mean that legitimate “dealers” will suddenly disappear. They’ll still be there seeding their own torrents, and since it’s a legit download, users will download that instead.
Finally, those who do pirate are already quite familiar with media that turn out to be viruses, malware or simply fake. This means that they’re far more likely to check what they download before they run/use it.