Josh Adams
In the past couple of decades, most of the developed world has become accustomed to having it’s musical whims seen to by the internet. Plundered, pinched or pirated — however you describe it — the vast majority of it hasn’t been paid for. These failures to make money in the sector and the industry’s various rates of decline have been talked about and chronicled at length, much to dismay of the freewheelin’ consumer, who would rather we shut up about the whole debacle, pretend music makes money like it used to and carry on with our lives.
In a way, the world has shut up about music piracy. From ten years ago (when music piracy made headlines) to now, we’ve seen a huge effect on how we see the ‘crime’. Internet culture has changed; it’s no longer the preserve of spotty, hormonal adolescents. ‘Normal people’ now frequent it’s digital chambers, making it harder and harder to demonize and criminalize a crime which at it’s most basic is the simple copying of files, something we do on a daily or even a minute-by-minute basis.
It’s a little harder for the record industry to cast aspersions on Nanny Pat, the innocent old lady whose grandson has taught her how to get back her lost record collection from the sixties, than it is her actual grandson, for example.
But despite the widening ‘market’ for the internet and the steadily increasing traffic that the net gets, music piracy has been going down. Music revenues are up too, a measly 0.3 percent to $16.5 billion, but even a small upswing has pundits and commentators rubbing their hands together at the prospect of music finally making money again. On top of this, digital music and services that make up digital downloads and subscription services like Spotify grew 9 percent in the same year.
In the same report by the Recording Industry Association of America, it was found that consumers are sharing less illegally downloaded music files over file-sharing networks (down a whopping 26% on the previous year) but also with people who use a slower, old-school method of burning and ripping CDs and subsequently swapping music files on hard drives and digital storage.
So piracy is becoming less of a big deal? But why is this? A look at Norway seems to back up the industry mumbo jumbo about how consumers are opting for better paid alternatives. Piracy there has dropped 82.5% over five years since 2008, and when asked 47% say they are using a streaming music service such as Spotify and nearly half of those say they are paying for the premium option too. This goes against the fundamental logic that nobody will pay for what they can get for free. But what they pay for in this instance wasn’t necessarily something you got for free anyway.
Before streaming you never had all of your music in a simple click-and-play legitimate format. Things were a little (and sometimes only a little) more complicated than that. Spotify and the like have essentially upgraded piracy and asked people to pay for it. Free options like Grooveshark and Soundcloud exist, but patchy catalogs among other problems make it less than ideal. With internet now a thing taken for granted, more people are apparently prepared to shell out on making their browsing as simple, holistic and as hassle free as can be. We can see this working already with consumers paying for newspapers and magazines when free options are still there for the taking.
What’s more interesting is how the record industry is trying to stop you enjoying your free music, rather than where it is encouraging you to buy. The approaches are fundamentally different.
In August 2012, Google announced that it was altering its algorithm in reaction against notices filed against them from rights holders to place infringing sites lower down in search results.
This had obviously very little impact since a search for the name of any leading artist followed by the term ‘mp3’ in any leading search engines still returns a massive haul of illegal content. But the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) is still arguing relentlessly that Google can do more to help them. And with their recent Youtube-sized adventure into music streaming, any attempt to avoid helping the segment of society from which the service is due to make an increasing amount of money (musicians) would just look hypocritical.
They’ll try other places than Google though. The arguably more powerful Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which hook us up to the World Wide Web have been having High Court orders dished out to telcos in the UK and elsewhere in the European Union demanding that they block access to sites serving pirated content. Earlier this year the IFPI annual report on digital music said that file-sharing had dropped by 11 per cent in the countries where such measures were imposed on ISPs, based on figures from comScore/Nielsen.
In early 2012, a High Court judge in the UK ruled that notorious file-sharing temple The Pirate Bay and its users had violated the copyright of nine record labels based in the United Kingdom. The decision quickly led to Britain’s biggest ISPs being slapped with court orders to halt all access to the site. The measures were then applied, although very liberally, so that anyone with a braincell and a keyboard could simply find a simple way round the block. But if the stream dream doesn’t quite turn out as planned, expect them to get a little tougher and pursue this further.
It’s highly unlikely that we’ll all find ourselves in some pre-2000 dungeon of musical destitution where all musical experiences have to be paid for upfront in cold hard cash. But the age where the world (and it’s businesses) have turned a blind eye to these pirating practices is over. The case for ‘free speech’ and a world where an unencumbered exchange of information can happen without impunity seem dimmer and dimmer when industry advocates talk the mantra of ‘common sense’ on the opposite side.
What will probably happen however, is that the record industry will make it so hard for your tipple of free tunes that, unfortunately, you’ll probably just want to pay for it anyway.
Will we eventually have to pay for music, again?
In the past couple of decades, most of the developed world has become accustomed to having it’s musical whims seen to by the internet. Plundered, pinched or pirated — however you describe it — the vast majority of it hasn’t been paid for. These failures to make money in the sector and the industry’s various rates of decline have been talked about and chronicled at length, much to dismay of the freewheelin’ consumer, who would rather we shut up about the whole debacle, pretend music makes money like it used to and carry on with our lives.
In a way, the world has shut up about music piracy. From ten years ago (when music piracy made headlines) to now, we’ve seen a huge effect on how we see the ‘crime’. Internet culture has changed; it’s no longer the preserve of spotty, hormonal adolescents. ‘Normal people’ now frequent it’s digital chambers, making it harder and harder to demonize and criminalize a crime which at it’s most basic is the simple copying of files, something we do on a daily or even a minute-by-minute basis.
It’s a little harder for the record industry to cast aspersions on Nanny Pat, the innocent old lady whose grandson has taught her how to get back her lost record collection from the sixties, than it is her actual grandson, for example.
But despite the widening ‘market’ for the internet and the steadily increasing traffic that the net gets, music piracy has been going down. Music revenues are up too, a measly 0.3 percent to $16.5 billion, but even a small upswing has pundits and commentators rubbing their hands together at the prospect of music finally making money again. On top of this, digital music and services that make up digital downloads and subscription services like Spotify grew 9 percent in the same year.
In the same report by the Recording Industry Association of America, it was found that consumers are sharing less illegally downloaded music files over file-sharing networks (down a whopping 26% on the previous year) but also with people who use a slower, old-school method of burning and ripping CDs and subsequently swapping music files on hard drives and digital storage.
So piracy is becoming less of a big deal? But why is this? A look at Norway seems to back up the industry mumbo jumbo about how consumers are opting for better paid alternatives. Piracy there has dropped 82.5% over five years since 2008, and when asked 47% say they are using a streaming music service such as Spotify and nearly half of those say they are paying for the premium option too. This goes against the fundamental logic that nobody will pay for what they can get for free. But what they pay for in this instance wasn’t necessarily something you got for free anyway.
Before streaming you never had all of your music in a simple click-and-play legitimate format. Things were a little (and sometimes only a little) more complicated than that. Spotify and the like have essentially upgraded piracy and asked people to pay for it. Free options like Grooveshark and Soundcloud exist, but patchy catalogs among other problems make it less than ideal. With internet now a thing taken for granted, more people are apparently prepared to shell out on making their browsing as simple, holistic and as hassle free as can be. We can see this working already with consumers paying for newspapers and magazines when free options are still there for the taking.
What’s more interesting is how the record industry is trying to stop you enjoying your free music, rather than where it is encouraging you to buy. The approaches are fundamentally different.
In August 2012, Google announced that it was altering its algorithm in reaction against notices filed against them from rights holders to place infringing sites lower down in search results.
This had obviously very little impact since a search for the name of any leading artist followed by the term ‘mp3’ in any leading search engines still returns a massive haul of illegal content. But the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) is still arguing relentlessly that Google can do more to help them. And with their recent Youtube-sized adventure into music streaming, any attempt to avoid helping the segment of society from which the service is due to make an increasing amount of money (musicians) would just look hypocritical.
They’ll try other places than Google though. The arguably more powerful Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which hook us up to the World Wide Web have been having High Court orders dished out to telcos in the UK and elsewhere in the European Union demanding that they block access to sites serving pirated content. Earlier this year the IFPI annual report on digital music said that file-sharing had dropped by 11 per cent in the countries where such measures were imposed on ISPs, based on figures from comScore/Nielsen.
In early 2012, a High Court judge in the UK ruled that notorious file-sharing temple The Pirate Bay and its users had violated the copyright of nine record labels based in the United Kingdom. The decision quickly led to Britain’s biggest ISPs being slapped with court orders to halt all access to the site. The measures were then applied, although very liberally, so that anyone with a braincell and a keyboard could simply find a simple way round the block. But if the stream dream doesn’t quite turn out as planned, expect them to get a little tougher and pursue this further.
It’s highly unlikely that we’ll all find ourselves in some pre-2000 dungeon of musical destitution where all musical experiences have to be paid for upfront in cold hard cash. But the age where the world (and it’s businesses) have turned a blind eye to these pirating practices is over. The case for ‘free speech’ and a world where an unencumbered exchange of information can happen without impunity seem dimmer and dimmer when industry advocates talk the mantra of ‘common sense’ on the opposite side.
What will probably happen however, is that the record industry will make it so hard for your tipple of free tunes that, unfortunately, you’ll probably just want to pay for it anyway.
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