The Effects Of Illegally Downloading Music On The Music Industry

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In 1999, a new file sharing service was introduced. This was called Napster. A peer to peer file sharing service where people could go on and download any song or album they wanted for free. That started a revolution; the download revolution. It has an effect on more than what most people think. It affects the record companies, the record stores, and the recording artists themselves. People need to not do it as much if they want to continue to have new music in their life. One thing illegally downloading music has an affect on is the record companies that produce the music. The record companies have to pay for the studio time and pay for the album to be made. If they don’t get any money in return from the people buying the album, then they have to cut back on employees. Michael Poth, in his article “Illegally Downloading Music”, he quotes Amy Adkins in her online article “How does illegally downloading music affect the music industry”. She writes that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has reported over seventy one thousand people have lost their jobs due to illegally downloading (“Michael”). They have to take away peoples jobs to recover from the loss of the billions of dollars due to illegal downloading. The RIAA tries to catch the hosts of the sites that have illegal music download available, such as Pirate Bay and Mediafire. The RIAA caught one student at Boston University and charged him $675,000 for downloading music (Lavoie). According to the RIAA, online piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses each year. With losing all that money they can not pay the employees to work. Because they have a low amount of employees, they can’t do as much work which cuts back on recruiting new artists. That is a big... ... middle of paper ... ...r of Oasis. He stated “Downloading is the same as I did: I used to tape-record the songs, the successes that I liked on the radio. I do not care. I hate seeing all these rock stars complaining. At least they are downloading your music and they are paying attention to you. Do you know? You should appreciate that. What are you complaining? You have 5 huge houses, so just shut up,” (top). The download revolution has changed the way everyone gets their music. They can either be good people and go out and buy a physical copy, or they can be stealers and illegally download it. Eventually downloading music will be the main thing because no one can stop it. You would have to completely shut down the internet to stop it and that won’t work because we all know how we rely on the internet for most things. The download revolution changed America and changed us as human beings.

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