So my friend thinks that internet piracy not only doesn't harm the music industry, but helps it

[wewontdie11]

I don't think it particularly helps or hinders musicians. You don't see 50 Cent making TV adds decrying the awful poverty he is currently living in because of piracy, every artist in the business seems to still do bloody well out of the industry.

A fair amount of the time the reason why people pirate music in the first place is because they can't afford to go out and buy a ton of albums, so even by stopping the piracy I can't see music profits greatly increasing because it still doesn't mean people have more money.

I'm slightly undecided on the issue as I see it as being akin to lending you mate a CD, and them ripping it to their PC, just you have a lot of friends to lend you CDs.

 

[Rayansaki]

Piracy makes music more widespread, it is its own industry. It, however, does not help most musicians make money.

This is where you and the anti-piracy associations are wrong. Piracy does indeed help musicians make more money. CD sales only account for an extremely small percentage of the musician's income, because most of the profit goes to the record labels.
The big chunk of income musician's have is the live concerts, and by increasing in popularity through piracy, the bands get more gigs and attendance.
I'll admit I haven't bought a music CD in over 5 years, but in those 5 years I've been to at least 50 concerts, and that helped the bands more than 5000 CD sales.

Piracy hurts record labels, but it helps artists.

some quick maths
take the amount of money spent on each ticket
take out a say ... 20% venue cut of the profit. next take another cut for the label. say the same. 60% of ticket left. Now divide by bands seen. say .. 4 15% per band. Now factor in how much travel cost food stay etc etc lots of costs. how much do they make from touring. Now make 1 cd. Sell it 500o times. Which wrks better 4 u?

Bands get more than 20% off of ticket sales.
Some bands get as low as 1-10 cents per CD sale. Go figure

 

[Nigh Invulnerable]

I'm not trying to justify piracy here, but since I'm a jobless teenager I can't afford to go out and buy every album for every band that I would like to hear. Thus, "trying before I buy" is the only way I can really discover new music and get into new bands.

I can definitively say that without "trying before I buy" there would be a lot of band shirts and vinyl that I wouldn't have bought and a lot of concerts that I wouldn't have bought tickets for.

See? You've supported the bands far better than someone who just buys an album. The people who actually write the music don't usually see much $ due to sales of the albums. Instead, they get money from merchandise and concerts (as well as endorsements if we're talking really big bands/artists).

 

[bushwhacker2k]

Piracy is in general a bad thing, but I'm not going to pay for a game I know nothing about.

 

[littlerob]

It's nice to see that there have been some good points made on both sides of the fence here.

Most of the problem here is on the part of the labels, to be completely fair. The market situation is changing and people aren't really willing to shell out £15 for perhaps forty minutes of material any more. The labels don't want to hear this and are completely unilling to adapt their business plan to suit, and instead would rather force the market to reconform to their business plan. As it is, they hardly have a leg to stand on in cases like the Pirate Bay - especially in public opinion, which is what counts, since they're being utterly collossal dicks about the whole situation. It's like watching a four-year-old throw a paddy because his sweets have fallen on the floor.

Like it or not, CDs are out of date. People would much rather have all their music easily accessible in one place and be able to play it all at once and mix up their own playlists. CDs can't do this, and they take up a bit of space if you've got loads of them. The people who buy CDs do it because they either like the look and feel of having CDs and their artwork (much like LPs nowadays), or they feel like they're giving something back to the musicians (which is technically, if indirectly, true, but not to the scale most people seem to think). The music industry doesn't want to acknowledge this, and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get people to start buying CDs again. Only, instead of just saying 'oh come on guys, we can't help the musicians if we don't get any money, and we only get money from you guys helping us out by buying CDs', they went down the 'you evil ba****ds stealing our money!' route, which understandably pisses some people off.

Personally, I only buy a few CDs. I use Spotify [http://www.spotify.com/en/] for nearly all of my music, and I buy CDs only if I really want them. I think the last two I bought were some early-80's Iron Maiden, mainly because I'll actually listen to those albums quite a lot. Most times, I'll only listen to a full album once or twice, and I don't honestly think that an hour of music is worth £15. I pay that much for twelve hours of gaming, or a thousand-page hardback, or a jaunt down the pub.

 

[Ninja_X]

CD sales mean nothing, therefore piracy hurts nothing.

 

[Kiju]

Mkay, here's my thoughts.

Internet Piracy does not help the music industry besides in the ways stated before this, for example, the fact if you download one song and like it, then go out and buy their album...good for them, right?

The way it doesn't help it is the fact that people will download the entire album without paying a cent for it, due to the fact they don't want to spend money on something like that, when the price of living is going constantly upwards.

However, I look at it like this: Say, you buy a 2 GB iPod, that can hold roughly 200-ish songs. Right? Right. Well, you can do this the legal way and go out to buy a CD, rip it, and put it on your computer to download...but CD's cost roughly $18 now (Southern-California, mind you..). Or, you can also go to say...iTunes Store and buy each song for 99 cents. Now...the latter is cool, because you can only download what songs you want.

However, this also means the following: You just spent around $150 for said iPod, then you're going to spend roughly another $200 just buying music to fill it with. So...anyone see the point I'm trying to convey?

 

[Rolling Thunder]

Actually, it does. It forces the to compete, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what frightens them the most. Publishers have had an olgiopolistic market for some time now, and, now that mass piracy has opened that market up wide open, they're panicking and demanding other close that market. Sure, piracy is illegal. But nobody cares, because the people it's hurting need to be hurt. It's not hurting the artists - when was the last time you heard them complaining, or heard of an artist who stopped playing becauseof music?

Never. Because most of them aren't in it for the money. Sure, they dream of becoming rockstars and living that life, but really, no musician ever got to that level by by being motivated soley by greed. It may have helped, yes, but frankly, even if all the companies go down there will still be as much music the world over. Probably more, and it will be just as good.

 

[SultanP]

I use the sampling method. I own a lot of music and video games that I would not have bought if I hadn't had the opportunity to try it out first. I have also tried pirating a game, complete it, and then buy it just to have it gather dust in my collection, all because I wanted to support those who made it.

 

[FightThePower]

Apparently bands make like 95% of their income from gigs rather than album sales. I don't know if the figure is that high but all I know is I will continue to torrent albums anyway. I enjoy free stuff.

 

[TacticalAssassin1]

I'm probably just a cynic but I just don't trust people to follow the "I'll pirate a few songs and if I like what I hear I'll invest in them" when they could get the whole hog for free.

Well you could always use Youtube to try out songs. That's what I do. And then if i like it i buy the album

 

[TacticalAssassin1]

I use the sampling method. I own a lot of music and video games that I would not have bought if I hadn't had the opportunity to try it out first. I have also tried pirating a game, complete it, and then buy it just to have it gather dust in my collection, all because I wanted to support those who made it.

And this. I like to have official stuff, like the CD from the actual band in the actual case ect. And same with games. So sure, I might pirate the game, and then buy the game or merchandise ect. which makes up for me pirating it in the first place

 

[ender214]

Well, if they only sample the music and then buy albums, it'll help. But the people that grab the entire discographies definitely aren't. Even if they go to concerts, it won't make up for downloading every single piece ever made by a band.

 

[Rob Sharona]

Sites like Spotify has made the try before you buy argument pretty redundant. You can hear pretty much all music for free.

 

[Rob Sharona]

I will say this, any track illegally downloaded is money that is not going to the band who created that track for you. You thieving bastards!

 

[EzraPound]

The "music industry" is not synonymous with "the corporate economy of major labels" - infact, the latter has a detrimental effect on the music industry, since it centralizes wealth in the hands of a small group of artists whilst underpaying most of its signees and aggressively combatting the public accessibility of music when it contradicts a profit motive, which is often. Additionally, the current major label structure constitutes an oligopoly, which by definition means it mismanages resources. For more info on the treatment of artists by major labels, I recommend reading "The Problem With Music" by Steve Albini:

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

Frankly put, stating that downloading music hurts "the music industry" is about as valid an argument as claiming the economic boycott of South Africa in the eighties was a bad idea because it jeopardized the economic stability of the nation's black populace - which is true, but it's still preferable to providing economic support to a system which pays artists in a manner that doesn't at all resemble their actual economic worth.

The major labels are the problem, not piracy.

 

[Red Albatross]

I don't pirate music, but I've seen a funny thing on 3 last concerts I've been to:
The frontmen actually said something like "It's ok to pirate our music as long as you go to concerts"

Seriously.

It's probably because a little known fact is just how little money artists signed with big record labels actually make from CD sales.

The publishers railing against piracy don't care about the artists and never will. They care about their own profits, and I'm perfectly content with letting them burn.

 

[Rob Sharona]

My brother plays trumpet for a solo artist signed to a major label. He gets about £2.50 money in his pocket for every album sale he makes. If he loses 10 album sales a week to illegal downloads, that's tantamount to someone stealing his rent money. That isn't the labels fault.

At the end of the day it's whether you can live with yourself doing it. I want my favourite bands to keep making music, so I will keep supporting them by not STEALING from them.

Here is his blog entry on the issue, it makes for a good read:
http://forgetcape.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/file-sharing/

 

[stone0042]

I think that people only pirate when they have no (or at least incredibly inconvenient) means to get these things otherwise. When a game costs $60, and kids my age make maybe $500 a year, you just can't afford to pay for all of your gaming needs.