Music and Digital Piracy

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How did we get here? After several consecutive years of growth and record high U.S. sales in 1999, CD sales throughout the United States and the world began to decline. Many industry executives (at least in part) blame this decline on digital piracy, which began in 1999 with Napster. From 1999 until 2002, CD sales worldwide plummeted 19.8 percent, roughly $7.7 billion. (Janssens, Vandaele, & Beken, 2009) The MP3 (MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) was the most influential technological advancement in the music industry since the creation of the CD in 1982. The MP3 enabled users to compress music from CDs into a format with slightly poorer quality that could be easily transferred through the Internet. The result is that MP3 audio files can be transferred from user to user without any loss of quality. (Gowan, 2000) This new technology allowed Shawn Fanning to create Napster, the first peer-to-peer music-sharing network. Launched in 1999, this service made it possible for users with the Napster software to search for and download music files from other users. The service operated using a central computer server that would list users who had certain songs and would make a bridge between them and other users that would allow them to share files. In December of 1999, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster, accusing the company of enabling and encouraging copyright infringement. Within one month of the lawsuit being filed, the number of Napster users grew from 50,000 to over150,000 and the number of songs available for download grew to over 20 million (Menn, 2003). At its height, Napster had 70 million registered users. In 2001, the court ordered Napster to block all copyright-infringing files, and w... ... middle of paper ... ...traditional artist’s development. As for the outlook on the recording industry, “Friday” raises the debate over some unintended consequences that the Internet has on music. One of the most complicated problems with the Internet is that there are little to no filters- allowing anyone to upload a song to YouTube, SoundCloud, ITunes, Facebook, blogs, etc. Because of this, the standards for music have been significantly lowered. Unfortunately, it would seem the music hobbyist and professionals are being smeared together and confused by the general public. It is no wonder that the value of music is plummeting when the work of a professional artist, with a team of managers and agents, now seems equivalent to the efforts of anyone with a laptop and a microphone. The “Friday” music video on YouTube currently has 362,222 likes, 1,338,685 dislikes, and 67,689,277 views.

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