- Confession: I work for a company that specializes in fighting music piracy, but I have definitely illegally downloaded my fair share of music from torrents and file-sharing sites over the last decade. I’ve never been busted by the police, nor have I ever had my internet service cancelled, but I will admit to my parents having received one or twelve letters from Comcast threatening to throttle our connection speed if said piracy should persist. Thankfully, things never came to that, but looking back now, they easily could have, and I would have almost certainly been at fault. Something changed, however, and it wasn’t my income or my parents’ willingness to support my addiction to new music. It was my understanding of entertainment not only as an art form, but also as a business, and it was at that moment I understood the true impact piracy has on the industry at large.
That's interesting, considering how many independent studies have found that piracy increases sales.
There are still a number of 'excuses' to pirate.
1. People who simply can't afford it. Some people are poor. They wouldn't be buying it anyway, they're not lost sales.
2. Region nonsense. We've all seen videos 'not available in your country.' I listen to both German and Japanese music – both of which are very difficult to find in my country. If someone pirates something which isn't possible to purchase, it's not a lost sale. Well, it is, but it was lost anyway. Due to stupidity.
3. DRM. DRM makes legally purchased content difficult or impossible to consume. My personal preference would be to purchase, then 'pirate' the DRM-free version, which would not be a lost sale. And which ought to be legal, if I have a license to consume. But it's not. Layers of stupidity.
4. It's not stealing. It's copyright infringement. It is neither legally nor morally stealing. You're not allowed to call it that until you stop claiming $22,500 per song in damages. Neither are you allowed to preach to me about morality, until you cease ruining entire families' lives over $1 songs.
I agree that there are reasons why someone would want to pirate something, but at the same time, I do think that people try to justify what they're doing, even if they know it's bad. Your reasons are all good, but you can't deny that there are people out there that don't need to pirate, but reason their way into a moral white area regardless.
Except noncommercial copyright infringment isn't bad, as the study rob05c linked and many others have shown. It's just the industry being paranoid and wanting control for its own sake.
What would actually hurt sales is people abandoning "their" commercial culture in favor of free and open culture.
If I can't buy it for retail prices than I'll pirate it. I've never downloaded a "leaked" album in my life. Most the stuff I "steal" has been out of print for a few decades. I don't feel bad downloading an album that is otherwise only available for $40 bucks. If it's a really fantastic album I'll pay up to $30 for the vinyl single album, I won't pay more than $20 for a CD.
I've done my share of music piracy and a pretty big one. I don't feel too bad about it. I wasn't earning money and couldn't afford to buy this music back then.
The other reason that came up later is the modern mastering quality. It is quite poor (because of things like compression and noise-reduction). For older records (which I listen to a lot) you're much better snatching some 1980s CD or even better an original vinyl copy. The audio quality will simply be much better. The prices of these ones can be astronomically high, where you can find quality vinyl rips (vinyl recordings converted to digital formats) on the web for free. Of course, when downloading such free versions, you could still purchase any original copy to support the artists.
For big labels artists most (I'm not sure but I read somewhere that it can even get up to 90%) of the money goes to the recording company, not the artist himself. Your money supports not exactly what you'll want it to. And so I feel it's more the industry that would benefit from stoping piracy than the artists themselves.
I've had really great experiences on the pirating sites I've participated in (most notably what.cd). They were great communities that are not about money. They're full of music lovers - people who rip obscure CDs, vinyls, discuss them with passion. They have nothing to earn, people just share music there out of love, because they want it to be heard.
And don't you think that the artists' main intention should be to just reach the audience no matter if it's through a pirated or a legal copy? I understand he must also earn money, but being an artist is not a regular job that one take just to make a living.
It seems the point of the article is more that there are outlets to get music for free by legal means, so theres no reason to illegally download anymore. This is not right or wrong because it is formulated as an opinion. So the guy who wrote the article feels this way about pirating music, but everyone has their own reasons for it so the article in a way lacks value imo.
I pay for the music from the artists I want to support. That being said, I do get my free/new music fix from soundcloud. There are tons of great artists giving their music away, just gotta weed through the crap.