Open Letter to Music Pirates from NPR

[magiccarpetride]

To me, the word combination "music industry" is an oxymoron. It can die for all I care, I wouldn't piss on it if it was on fire. I am convinced that the death of music industry will have no negative effect on music whatsoever, probably the opposite.

Same as the death of telegram industry had no negative effect on people's ability to communicate long distance.

[ralphpnj]

The modern media industries, which includes music, movies, video, books, magazines, etc., are all trying, rather unsuccessfully, to live with the fact current digital media has pretty much sacrificed content protection for user convenience. For me the 5,000 pound elephant in the room whenever the subject of piracy is discussed is why is it so damn easy to copy "copyrighted" digital content? Because making that digital secure would mean a very unpleasant user experience. Imagine having to enter a 10 digit code into a CD or DVD or blu-ray player every time you wanted to play a disc? Not very convenient. So years ago these industries WILLFULLY chose user friendliness over security and now they are paying a very high price. Too bad for them.

Add to this the fact these industries are in no way trying to solve the problem. For example, the Netflix movie and video streaming model has been an overwhelming success and yet not a week goes by without reading how yet another movie studio is pulling their films from Netflix streaming. The problem is not piracy per say but rather loss of income. The Netflix streaming model solves the "piracy" issue since people who can stream a movie will most likely not bother to download an illegal copy of that movie but the industry does not like the vastly reduced revenues which result from streaming. Basically they have yet to accept streaming revenue versus no revenue, aka piracy. Again too bad for them.

[pippin]

It's not just piracy vs. convenience, it's also "go f... yourself, there's other things I can do" vs. convenience.
I don't pirate stuff, but if I can't get it easily and conveniently, I've got enough other things to do. And the same thing is true of others. There are more media available yet the day still only has 24h, someone has to suffer from that.
The one who offers least convenience will suffer most.

[ralphpnj]

It's not piracy vs. convenience, it's also "go f... yourself, there's other things I can do" vs. convenience.
I don't pirate stuff, but if I can't get it easily and convenient, I've got enough other things to do. And the same thing is true of others. There are more media available yet the day still only has 24h, someone has to suffer from that.
The one who offers least convenience will suffer most.

Quite true, however I was referring more to how the present situation arose. You make a good point about the present state of all things digital.

[JonWill]

Same as the death of telegram industry had no negative effect on people's ability to communicate long distance.

Not necessarily true - most of the telegraph industries morphed into telephone companies - and are now looking at multiple communication media. There are several issues facing the music industry:
- rise of piracy due to both the "entitlement culture" and a is-judged idea of exploitation
- An inability over the last two decades to embrace new business models (unlike the telegraph industry) - caused in part by the success of CD (enabling them to sell the same content twice to consumers) and complacency - in turn allowing Apple and now Spotify to get in on the act
- A rise in the power of major artists - no longer an exploitative cash cow for them

Therefore it is plausible that the current crop of large players may go. However a music industry needs to exist - despite the rise of social media a media company acts as an arbiter of quality - filtering out the "good" from the "dross" for the mainstream - the kind of music I like will always be on the periphery of this, but it serves a purpose.

I think the piracy debate is different when it comes to the exploitation of musicians - and that is where the original article is great...

J

[Soulkeeper]

despite the rise of social media a media company acts as an arbiter of quality

Perhaps, but as long as social media does that job way better than the media companies themselves do it (which IMO is the case), what does it matter?

[ralphpnj]

I think the piracy debate is different when it comes to the exploitation of musicians - and that is where the original article is great...

J

The public, acting as pirates, would have to illegally upload/download every song ever recorded millions of times to come anywhere close to exploiting musicians the way the music industry has exploited musicians over the past hundred plus years. Please stop trying to defend these criminals.

[cliveb]

a media company acts as an arbiter of quality - filtering out the "good" from the "dross" for the mainstream

That's funny, I always got the impression that the music industry's primary focus was to convince the mainstream that the dross is worth buying. Since the dross always outnumbers the good, and since the industry's goal is to shift as much product as possible, it is in their interests NOT to make any distinction.

[JonWill]

Trust me there's a whole lot more dross out there that they don't touch - MySpace and Soundcloud are now letting people have an outlet! It's analgous to publishing. There are a lot of novels under people's beds. Publishers chose the "best" (or those they can make money out of...). Historically some were self-published to some level of success. IN the current world everyone can publish their books electronically. It doesn't make them good... (and the very rare case of an e-book only success does not make the model work!).

[Fozzy]

Interesting article.

For me, morally as well as legally, one
should obtain music in a way that at least has the potential to provide the writers and performers of the music with money unless they specifically choose to give the music away. That could be through direct payment for the music or it could be by consuming the music through a service where advertising revenue is fed back to the producers of the music or any other such arrangement as someone can devise.

I also don't think that obligation goes away if we happen to know the commercial arrangement between a particular artist and their record company and think the record company is being greedy.

The article makes mention of the supply of technology and services to enable music to be pirated and it is perhaps worth noting that the supply of these is subject to competition which tends to work in favour of the consumer compared to the supply being a monopoly. By contrast whoever holds the rights to a creative work has an effective monopoly. The same song has not been written by anyone else nor the same movie produced by anyone else. Here in the UK the rights to televise some football matches have been auctioned for a ridiculous sum of money which the companies concerned expect to recover from their subscribers because they know many of them would never refuse to pay and do without the content concerned, yet that is the correct response when we, as consumers, do not find the terms offers by the rights owners acceptable.

Finally we come to the analogy of the neighbourhood called "The Net" and its lack of police force. This analogy is clearly designed to lead us to the conclusion that extra laws that restrict the rights of citizens or allow them to acted against as if guilty when guilt has not been established are as natural as putting in the missing police force. Here I must wholeheartedly disagree. Principles such as innocent until proven guilty and the freedom of people to go about their business without undue interference are more important than the problems of the rights owners and should not be eroded.