The rhino isn’t eating a flannel
A very recent reignition of that old chestnut, the debate about “pirates” sharing music on the internet, has stimulated my brain as it always does.
I’m not going to bang on about it. I don’t think either side is right. I’m too tired to care at the moment. I’m also not going to point out that Lily Allen seems to be encouraging use to use the service called Spotify (it lets us “access music without having to rip someone off”), and yet Lily Allen also seems to be saying that Spotify gives musicians no money.
If I mentioned it too much, it would be comically living up to the stereotype of the blogosphere – the idea of every web publisher thinking that everybody else totally gives a toss about what they think. Why would you want to get my extremely non-unique perspective? Haven’t you got better things to do?
But it annoys me that the archaic “you wouldn’t walk into a shop and steal a pineapple” argument is still being wheeled out over and over again. The number of pineapples in the world is limited to how many have been grown and picked, each at some expense. When you steal a pineapple, there is one less pineapple in the shop. When you “steal” a music, the “shop” from which you have taken that music is no worse off than it would be if you achieved your status as someone who didn’t buy that music by simply walking past the pile of musics. In the magical digital age, the people who make music do more or less the same amount of work whether there are seven or seven million copies of the same audio file. That’s how this stuff works, remember?
Obviously people know that. I’m not all that keen on being patronising. But they don’t think about it, evidently. I’m just pointing it in case it will help them to remember to think about it.
This is, as you may have noticed, absolutely not big aggregation, or a meaty summing-up. It’s too much of a hairy minefield and I am not the man for the job. Sorry about that. It’s not the whole jigsaw puzzle, just a little jigsaw piece that has slipped underneath the sofa. But do things make a bit more sense now you can see the hippopotamus’s face? It’s no longer a rhino that’s walked into a tapestry.
Samuel Ryan
I don’t like or agree with Piracy, it’s wrong period. However I don’t agree with criminalising it, your argument is one I’ve been using for years; by pirating you’re not taking you’re just not giving. I was rather shocked by what lily said though, I’ve always assumed – and I think it was mentioned somewhere – that spotify went towards the artists and finding out they don’t has kinda annoyed me.
Piracy is a touchy subject, either the music industry needs to grow up and start evolving to meet our demands or they can continue with this and find nobody paying for their product. Spotify is a perfect example, constantly paying to listen to music through subscriptions and advertisements and it’s very popular, yet lots of companies aren’t embracing it – it’s not even available properly in america yet – and those that do embracing it are fleecing the artists.
I really dislike the music industry.
Ashley Morgan
The thing that always amazes me is that people cannot understand the difference between file sharing and piracy.
File sharing is a valuable way of getting music in the public arena and is, and will continue to be, one of the most important weapons in any independent musicians arsenal.
The fact that Lily Allen and others like her cannot comprehend this is a constant source of amusement and occasional source of frustration.
Underdogblogger
The music industry is like a big old rhinosaur – it will become extinct eventually in some sort of future dystopian mash up of william gibson style technology and soundgarden’s music.
Ian W. Parker
My current question is “How do musicians wish to monetize their product?”
Thinking on the situation, I can understand how file sharing can be a great form of dissemination, but I can also see how it is used and abused. So the digitization of assets makes for easy copying (sanctioned or otherwise).
So suppose a musician decides to make money on touring and merch alone. Well, aside from astronomical ticket prices (of which I am not sure what percentage trickles back to the performers), there’s the need to constantly tour to make an income.
Not a bad thing necessarily, but it can be grueling at times, and there does need to be some down time for making more music to release, right? Merch, like anything retail, can be volatile. I’ve seen a fair number of independents move to micro-transactions, which look good to me in theory, but I wonder how the practice works.
Do those individual song sales work well? Is the purchased music then not subject to piracy just like any other medium that can be digitized? Are people becoming more ethical when music is presented as a “small” musician just trying to get by?
Like you stated, Joshua, it’s a big, “hairy minefield”. I’ve not got all the answers, but those are some of the things I wonder.