Piracy isn’t destroying musicians’ ability to earn a living

[sincity]

Many musicians understandably hate online music piracy but there's no evidence that it's turning them into starving artists. Timothy Lee at The Washington Post's Wonkblog has posted a chart using data from the London School of Economics showing that music industry revenues have remained largely flat over the past decade despite the collapse in sales of recorded music. Musicians have managed to survive by increasing the total revenues generated through concerts, which grew from $10 billion in 1998 to more than $25 billion in 2011. So while consumers are no longer as willing to pay for full CDs or even individual MP3s, they do seem willing to fork over their money to see their favorite artists in shows. Wonkblog's chart of music revenues follows below.

 

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[Narbisaur]

Music piracy was never going to destroy musicians' like Justin Beiber's or groups like Metallica's ability to make a living. I don't think that was ever the argument. If it was, it was a stupid argument. The music industry's sales have remained flat for the recording artists that report their revenues to groups like the RIAA and MPAA, both greedy organizations, who are doing everything they can to keep sales as high as they were. In addition, with social media and the ability to market online for virtually no cost at all becoming a part of every major record labels daily workings, of course they are making more money on things like merchandise, shows, brands...etc. Every little shit pop-star has their own perfume, clothing line, action-figure.... and not only do they have them, but there is a big market for them. Market to the kids, get parents to buy. When was it possible to do this? Not until recently. Pop-stars are no longer artists, they are a full-fledged PRODUCT/BRAND. Can you really say that applies to all musicians, though?

 

Music piracy has both it's downsides and upsides. On the upside, people who weren't going to be exposed to certain music can get the full stuff for free. However, most people already put their music in some form online for free, and not paying for the music you get from, say, a producer from the UK when you live in Australia and will never see them live... that's stealing. Especially if you have respect for that person, why you wouldn't just go to their site and pay the minimal fee (usually like 5 bux for a whole album in WAV, most, if not all, of the proceeds going to the artist) baffles me.

 

Understandably, people don't wanna pay 10 bux for their favorite skrillex album from iTunes. But that's what you get when you listen to pop. Overpriced, mass marketed, stuff that groups like iTunes use to make a whole lot of money (hardly any of that 10 bux goes to the artist).

 

A lot of creative artists also include really cool stuff in their hardcopy cd's. However, since CD's are (usually) limited to 44.1kHz 16-bit, a lot of people opt for direct download from the artist's site.

 

Also, with sites like grooveshark and soundcloud, where you can listen to a good deal of almost every artists music out there for free, how can you justify taking it without paying? If you like it enough, pay the artist for it. If they are respectable artists, they usually don't ask for that much. A lot of artists even put their stuff out there for free. Gramatik, for instance, and a good deal of other artists on the Pretty Lights label do this.

 

But for god sakes..... don't buy crap on iTunes.

 

NOW, the argument that music piracy doesn't affect anyone is demonstrably false. Dave Tipper was just on tour and needed heart surgery and almost died, and the only thing that saved him was that Addictech.com allowed him to throw together an early release album and sell it, whilst giving him 100% of the proceeds to pay for his surgery. He's probably still way in debt, and could just afford the downpayment on getting his chest ripped open. Should someone who has had as much impact on the music world as Dave Tipper need to be literally on the verge of death just to get paid for the shit he produces? I think not.

 

The line for me is distribution and audience. If you and your friends swap music, even your entire library, that's fine. I do that all the time. The problem comes when you host someone else's music on some server for literally millions of people to take for free, with no regulation from the artist on what quality of recording you are distributing, no regulation on how the files are organized, labeled, the info that goes with them, ...etc. If the artist wanted people to mangle their product and give it away for free, potentially giving the people who get it the wrong idea about said artist, they would say so.

 

If you don't wanna pay for the stuff on deadmau5's label, that's cool. The dude isn't gonna go broke, ever. However, don't f*** over people like Dave Tipper.