Everything you need to know about music piracy in one article
No, not this one. This one. It’s a column written by India Knight in the Sunday Times this weekend about ‘Generation Freeload’, and you really should read it in full. Why? Well:
- “When Coldplay put their latest album online and said people could pay as much as they wanted for it – 5p or £5 or whatever they felt like – it turned out that most people still downloaded it illegally, for convenience.”
- “Downloads have already completely transformed (ie, killed) the music business, but I’d mind more if it hadn’t for so long appeared to be run by grossly overpaid people who never seemed to do much apart from take inhuman quantities of cocaine.”
- “There is a whole class of people that never pays for things, or at least not for the things that the rest of us regularly get our wallet out for. They’re the ones you find yourself sitting next to on a supposedly budget airline flight: you’ve coughed up £200 for your seat; they gleefully tell you they paid a fiver. They’ve watched the film du jour weeks before it opens in the UK. They listen to free music and don’t watch television by episode but by series.”
Oh my. The general tone of the column makes us hardly surprised the writer has confused Coldplay for Radiohead, but what were you thinking Sunday Times subs?
Tags: coldplay, Radiohead, sunday times
March 9th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
The problem with this entire discussion is that people have wrongly focused on piracy as being the primary downfall of the music industry. And so, out of pure desperation, they try to keep the problem from spreading. But, the real unavoidable underlying problem is that the current level of technology is outpacing any legal means to prevent the symptom that is music piracy. Any 10-year-old, with any degree of computer skills, can stick a CD in their computer, copy it, and send it out across the web in the matter of seconds. What is the RIA going to do about that? Are they going to start throwing 10-year-olds in jail or will they sue them for millions, because they are so tech savy? The other half of the problem is that data storage devices are large enough that a person need only buy their music library once, and they never need to buy it again. They just buy another storage device and copy the music for safe keeping. Also, every day thousands of new bands create their own music at home on their computer, upload it to the web, and give it away for free. All these points help to further identify that it is our access to technology, not simply piracy, that is the real underlying problem that is leading to the eventual downfall of the music industries outdated business model. Instead of wasting millions trying to fight piracy, it’s time to step back and spend those millions in a new direction to try to develop a business model for the music industry that actually makes sense, before it is too late.
Corey Bray
March 10th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Before I post my comments I want to be clear that I am not defending music piracy, it is theft and should be dealt with as such. I am also not defending the “he did this to me so let me do this to him” mentatility either.
What I am proposing is that the music industry has ripped off the consumer for years in charging ridiculous prices for music and all that goes along with that (concert tickets, t-shirts, stickers, buttons, posters, etc). Why were those things not blogged about in a knockoff report or looked into by private investigators, etc?
BTW, thanks Corey for pointing out that access to tecnology is partly to blame in this issue as well. Too many people who “want to get the bad guy” are often looking through blinders and don’t see the whole picture.
April 8th, 2009 at 8:51 am
hey i think music isnt the same any more every one has change rnb is going down hip hop is going down im make music you no the funny thing about it all is tha only real people listen to real music