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Stop piracy
Illustration: Lee Nutland www.leenutland.com
You need to stop stealing music. It’s just not on. It’s time to uninstall BitTorrent and establish a new-found respect for intellectual property. You wouldn’t steal a television or a handbag, would you? And what’s the difference between petty larceny and piracy?
It turns out there’s a big difference, and the situation was going to get a lot worse. Comparing swapping cassette tapes to using BitTorrent on a 20Mb/s-plus connection is like comparing Momma Jane’s fiveplant grow-op to the Gulf cartel’s cocaine operation. And maybe, just maybe, Metallica had a point.
Somehow my attitude didn’t change when my collection grew to tens of thousands of MP3s and my downloads folder contained dozens of untouched albums. I never stopped to think about whether I had the right to treat artists’ work this way or the level of impact it had.
When people started downloading, music modems made a series of beeps, clicks and high-pitched digital screams during dial-up, you had to disconnect when your mum needed the landline and it took 25 minutes to steal a single song. The problem is fans’ ambivalence towards piracy has barely changed since.
The court case happened at the start of the 00s, when UK album sales were three or four years away from reaching a peak of 163 million units per year in 2004 (after eight years of decline they hit a historic low of 101 million in 2012). Music sales have been utterly decimated over the last decade, and where artists do make sales they earn considerably less per purchase.
It’s been argued that music piracy is positive because it permits users to filter purchases and provides a promotional channel for artists. That used to be true. Now the wealth of streaming services means it’s easy to try before you buy and social media-led promotion has created the most meritocratic talent discover system ever.
Napster was launched at the end of the 90s, opening piracy up to the masses and servicing billions of downloads a month. Metallica took Napster to court a few years later to protect the artistic integrity of a song they wanted to launch on the Mission: Impossible II soundtrack (as the backing for a slo-mo shot of Tom Cruise pestering a flock of white doves, presumably). The band made its name from tapeswapping; what’s the difference between a tape and a folder of music, and when did this group of infamous metalheads become the man?
Changing buying patterns, such as the increase in single sales, did a lot of damage, but I’d argue piracy played a key role. At the beginning, file sharing services evolved faster than industry offerings and eroded the value of music in much the same way free online news devalued words.
We have to accept that in this digital age the leeway we have in the way we treat others’ intellectual property has to be significantly tightened if talent is going to flourish. And we need to do everything we can to promote respect for music as the ability to fund artists’ work slowly collapses.
My first albums were on a cassette tape; Skunk Anansie’s Stoosh was on one side and Music for the Jilted Generation the other. Later a friend recorded her dad’s Jimi Hendrix records song by song, sitting there for the entire 90 minutes to get the cuts right.
Obviously there’s no comparison between stealing a handbag and downloading the latest Taylor Swift album, although both constitute a crime in their own way, but we do need to change the way we think about intellectual property. It’s not fair to plagiarise
news copy, to stream movies or to download albums. It’s time to end music piracy, even if it’s a big record label or we think we’ve spent enough money on merchandise. And it’s time to move away from the way we used to view the issue. ----------
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Christopher Goodfellow
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