A Word on Piracy

As the astute among you have surely noticed, piracy is one of the biggest issues surrounding the modern music industry. Debates rage over the unethical nature of the piracy or the wrongs of the major labels and I genuinely believe both sides have valid points, but I want to specifically talk about one of the problems I have with current piracy. Note also that while I’ll be talking specifically about piracy in the music industry, most of my points, as far I can tell, should apply to all mediums in which piracy takes place.

To begin with, let’s look at the justifications that are often provided by those who pirate. ‘Music is too expensive/too hard to get a hold of’ is the closest one I've heard to being a valid argument and I do, to an extent, agree, at least in that I believe cheap music should be easier to get a hold of. Though the music industry is now finally getting to grips with things like internet streaming and the value of online sales, it’s still far too often the case that your only options to buy an album are to either go out and get the physical copy or have it imported. There are some artists whose music I do enjoy, but not enough to spend R150 for a 10-12 song album. In these situations I would happily turn to sites like Bleep or Boomkat to get these albums in mp3s for a fraction of the physical copy’s price, but unfortunately that is not always an option. Clichéd as it may be, it does tend to be the major labels like EMI and Universal that still doggedly demand that you go down to a record store and buy the full, physical copy any time anything you are even vaguely interested in gets released.

The problem is, this line of reasoning comes apart a bit when you take into account the levels of piracy for releases that do give you convenient and cheap alternatives. Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows is a prime example of this. Even though the album was initially released online and could be legally downloaded for free, there were still more copies of the album that were pirated than were downloaded or bought legally. People, it seems, are turning to piracy out of habit more than anything these days and that is a major problem. There are few bands that are as ideally placed to survive in the music industry as Radiohead are and so, while they still made a big profit off In Rainbows’ sales, many smaller bands will not be able to survive being faced with similar piracy figures.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what can be done about this. What would be ideal is that people are sensible enough to start going back to paying for their music as it becomes increasingly cheap and easier to just buy it online. That, unfortunately doesn't look like it’s going to happen. It’s evidently hard to compete with habit and free music. Streaming may be the answer, but we’re still a long way from that being one of the primary methods of long term music distribution. It would be very sad if genuinely good artists and labels go down due simply to people’s laziness regarding their habits, but at the moment it seems piracy is here to stay, regardless of the alternatives.