At least for the past two decades piracy in the music industry has been practiced in one way or another. Before, it was practiced through tapes, then through pirate CDs, and now through the internet. The most sensitive point to the music industry (besides the damage caused to intellectual property owners) nowadays is the speed of piracy, which is what has hurt in a several way the music record label industry. But there are two faces of the coin here, those “in favor” (not really “in favor” but that don’t claim about piracy) and those against piracy and the internet is a determining agent in this dilemma.
On the one hand, there are many people to whom piracy is beneficial: general public and emerging artists (generally). Consumers have two options, to pay and not to pay. Therefore, is it difficult to know which will be their preference? From the point of view of the consumers there are two advantages of “sharing” (usually called pirating) music. First, as before mentioned, the main advantage is cero costs (although a few would feel that the “cost” is knowing that piracy is not right, but just a few). Another advantage is that people can discover new music without the need of buying, and that can barely be found in a local CD store. Let’s say an example of a Pagode (a type of samba music) group, would never be found in an European CD store, but easily found in the internet and then downloaded (depending on the P2P program).
Furthermore, digital technology has given incredible ease to emerging artists, who would not need to have an enormous expensive recording studio to make their music. Digital recording has facilitated everything, making it so easy to record one song in different countries without physical movement (in a general way depending on the needs). Therefore, nowadays to the artists there’s no need to incur in “extra” costs to reach their fans or audience. In this case the “extra” costs would be the intermediaries in this process: all the fixed and variable costs (and margin) of the CD (“packaging”) industry. Many musicians would be benefited by the efficiency and speed of piracy to be known, others would prefer to share their music through their web pages for a lower price, but still they need the internet.Independently of piracy or not piracy, with all these examples is that in one way or another, THE INTERNET IS PREFERRED. And once having mentioned that, I come back to the main problem of the internet: the ease of piracy.
On the other hand, the record label industry has been seriously hurt. Maybe these are those days in which CDs are becoming collectible items in the same way the LPs became. It is necessary to move immediately to the digital era and as fast as possible. To fight with music piracy is useless. As a matter of fact, according to an interview to Sean Parker in CBS news (the head of what once was Napster) approximately 4 billion legal downloads fight against approximately 3 to 10 trillion illegal downloads. His Spotify project is based on a “convenience and accessibility” basis, which includes enormous music libraries available for people for a price. This could definitely work, but there’s no clear answer of how he’s going to compete with Apple and with free music (Kazaa, Ares, Limewire, etc). Maybe wireless technology along with portable devices would be interesting innovations to get those enormous music libraries mentioned by Parker.
A couple of things have to be clear: fighting music piracy is useless, the industry has to offer something better than what piracy can do (a hard job, isn’t it?); and internet is fundamental for the music industry growth (although for the moment has been kind of bitter for the record label industry). Innovation is necessary to keep this industry going although piracy is not justified under any concept. But what is most important of all is that somehow we have to find a way to keep the music industry business healthy, remunerating all those geniuses behind the creation, arrangement, recording and production of each song we enjoy in our car, office, bar or whichever place we are.
