Piracy in the music and film is an ever-growing issue that people who choose to join the industries must live with and adapt to as technology and times change. The issue with piracy is not as cut and dry as people perceive. There are many people who lose serious cash from illegal downloading and streaming; on the other hand, there are those whose entire careers have been made from free streaming or downloading and would not be where they are today if it weren’t for piracy. I had the chance to have an amazing interview with Darryl Ohrt, a former singer of a punk rock band who worked in the music business for 10 years, after ran a digital agency that did work with music labels like SONY; who has also worked with a few bands in terms of promotion …show more content…
jobs lost • $2.7 billion in workers ' earnings losses • $422 million in tax revenue cost • $291 million in personal income forfeiture • $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes. That said, the music publishing revenue model is changing quickly, and new opportunities are presenting themselves all the time. No business model remains unchanged forever - and the music industry has been woefully slow at recognizing this. (Cox, Economics 5070-76) Consumers are actually losing because of quality. They’re exposed to more choices than ever before, but the quality of the product is not on par with what can be legally paid for. Labels are still trying to catch up. Their strategy is to sue instead of find middle ground, which is their own fault. They could have been the first to see streaming as a replacement for physical media like cassettes and CDs. “I’d say not just piracy, but digital production of content has affected quality. Listen to something streamed at 160kps or worse on many sites and compare it to a CD. You’ll notice a definite difference. The promise of the digital age was that music was supposed to get better in terms of reproduction quality, not worse. Listen to the recording process a band goes through in the studio and compare it to what you can download. It’s night and day.” (Green, personal …show more content…
Music sharing is comparable it to the early days of radio. Getting your song played on radio wasn’t easy and was a big deal. Once someone succeeded, they could count on the fact that people would hear it and the artist would sell units and ticket sales. Piracy does the same and it benefits developing artists more than established artists. “I’d venture to guess that the majority of Taylor Swift’s fans have purchased her music. The same could not be said for upcoming alternative bands.” (Ohrt, personal interview) Conversely, there are two different dynamics. Bands seem to benefit from piracy in terms of increased exposure, but if they are truly good, they will end up on the radar of someone at a label or well-known artist soon enough. As for films, that world is a tight community in terms of distribution. No film hoping to make it would try and go around the system because all of the people associated with its production would not have a career for long. (That’s not to say American movies aren’t copied and show up on the black market overseas.) But here, “a film gets attention by traveling the festival circuit in hopes of distribution.” (Green, personal
Singers and songwriters need to make a living somehow. They know that downloading music is a way to get their voice heard, but they also know that it is significantly hurting the business. "When your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action," said RIAA president Cary Sherman (RIAA 1). There are a lot of people involved in the music scheme when it comes to who needs to get paid by the revenue. From the sale of one CD, singers get one small fraction of the cost, another fraction goes to song writers, musicians also get some of the profit along with retailers, engineers, technicians, warehouse working, and ever...
In Charles W. Moore’s essay, “Is Music Piracy Stealing?” Moore uses great statistics of the people who are concerned and not concerned about music piracy. He gives many examples of the facts he has researched and gives an ethical appeal to his audience. “This week the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) launched an ad campaign using the slogan ‘copying is stealing,’ attempting to convey the message that digital copying is as serious and criminal as stealing a CD from a record shop or a DVD from a video shop” (Moore 242). However, throughout Moore’s entire essay he has a weak introduction and conclusion paragraph, repetitive examples, examples that do not apply to his topic and he uses many logical
However, despite the strong copyright policy and punishment of the United States Federal Copyright Act, as enforced by police as well as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), piracy still rages on, especially...
piracy issues over the Internet would cost record companies more money than what they are
The vibrations on our eardrums make the most interesting sounds. Some vibrations turn into voices, others animal vocals, but the most common is the vibrations of music .Observing our society one can find an individual “plugged” into some form of listening device; be it a cell phone, ipod, or old fashioned listening device. Music plays a large part of every individual's life. Whether it is composed for a movie, audience or transferred through earbuds, music has always been there. But at one point or another each and every one of us has had the urge to listen to instruments with the occasional vocals or vice versa, depending on his or her style of music. Except the process to listen is not how it seems. In Charles W. Moore’s essay “Is Music Piracy Stealing,” he attempts to explain if one downloads a song without paying the composer it is taking away from working an honest living. His argument is valid but because of his limited amount of information on this topic, Moore's essay tends to fade due to poor writing style, weak analogy, and scatter brained content.
The Internet—as it did for almost everything—has radically changed the way people get music. The Internet has cut into the music industry's profits. It reduced the demand for CDs, increased the interest in singles and let people decide whether they want to pay for the new Prince album. This alone could be offset if all of the people pirating music would go to their favorite artists' shows. However, the hard economy has rapidly cut into people's ability to spend on luxury items and concerts rank right up there with sports in terms of practicality.
While many suggest that music piracy is destroying the music industry, others claim that it is actually helping. On average, people who pirate music “legitimately purchase 30 percent more music than non-P2P (Peer to peer) users.” This is what Betsy Issacson claims (Issacson). Most of this music is copied from friends and families that bought it from a music store. In 18-29 year olds, this is where they get about 30% of their music from.
Though many people do think that music piracy is a bad thing, there are some pro arguments, which are very valid. Some say that artists don't feel affected by file sharing and support the fact that piracy creates a bigger fan base for them. Many unsigned artist have produced free records so copyright wasn't an issue. Which could be a new and upcoming thing for artist to d...
“Unsurprisingly, major record companies took issue with large-scale distribution of their music for free, and sued Napster for direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement of copyright in order to protect their intellectual property” (Washington University School of Law). Despite the fact that people and companies are violating copyright infringement, many people think that copyright infringement isn’t such a bad thing. They feel copyright actually helps the artist’s exposure by giving people a convenient way to listen to their music. This interpretation is unreasonable. Artists should not be embezzled and filched of their musical products.
People pay low subscription fees to streaming services, and as a result of this, listeners can be exposed to new artists and help these artists become popular (“Music Industry”). New artists are exposed to more people as streaming services often increase the amount of artists that people listen to. While streaming services do result in more exposure for an artist, that’s where the benefits stop. One of the issues with streaming services is payment issues. "Public relations missteps in the early 2000s kept many musicians from speaking out about economic issues, artists and executives said... But the shift toward streaming in recent years has prompted many musicians to investigate the changes in the business and comment online (Sisario)." Artists are not being paid much for providing their music to streaming services, but these issues and artist protests are being ignored by executives of the services until a high-profile artist makes the wage disparity public. "Streaming services pay a lot less than downloads, with the artists receiving a fraction of a cent per play on the service. Newer artists could struggle with the level of payments offered by the services, opponents have argued (O’Brien).” Hardworking artists are not receiving as much money from streaming services as they did from people purchasing their albums. This
Corporate copyright industry controllers publicly voice concerns about globally lost revenue, vocally touting that pirates take part in criminal action that pressures companies into downsizing employee numbers and decreasing investment in future endeavors. Music, film, TV, movie, and softwares industries are all worth billions of dollars, with record companies alone bringing in nearly $25 billion dollars. As a consumer, it’s hard to reconcile the thought of a $25 billion dollar industry claiming piracy revenue losses well into the hundreds of billions. Industry advocates cite any act of media piracy as a harmful act and an act that inhibits them from making money; therefore the perceived loss or potential loss of those hundreds of billions
There are a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. The main reason that this is such a big issue is because piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction; for example, someone who would have originally bought a DVD of the movie Young Guns but instead downloads it for free on The Pirate Bay. In this case, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This happens frequently if the “pirate” lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he or she downloa...
According to the book “Pirate’s Dilemma,” “Are Pirates have to scupper us? Are they a threat to be battled or innovators we should compete with and learn from?” (Matt Mason 4). Piracy has and will always be a threat to the whole media industry and of course the economy. As long as people can download for free or buy never been released movies in a cheaper price, there is no way media industries can compete with that.
Production companies took a bold step forward by uploading their content online. People now are not obliged to buy a full album to listen to one song, for a minimal fee you can buy the track you want, the same goes for movies and electronic publications. The downloaded files though will be digitally protected so that only the person who downloads them can use them, and he can’t share them at home or with friends. Even with this step from production companies, a large portion of people who download music still do it for free. Moreover hackers came up with new ways to remove the digital copyrights so the same as before one downloads music and distributes them around.
From the results I was able to find out that music piracy does affect the music market by lowering the employment rate of the country as well as the total revenue received by the music market; however, the market has found other ways to protect their market like creating digital sales, which has worked as a way to increase revenue in the last 2 years.