Another music piracy thread, another bunch of myths to be busted. I don't mean to sound high-minded, but as a musician, some of the blatant mistruths here are painful to read.
Firstly, to everyone saying musicians make no money off record sales: not true. Musicians take a smaller chunk of royalties than record labels, true, but they still usually get a royalty rate of around 20%. And while that doesn't sound like a lot, remember that to a band taking a year off touring to write and record a new album, that royalty cheque is probably the only income they're going to get for the entire year. Worse, by pirating the album you're not sending any kind of message to the record labels about their unfair take of the record profits, and how they should cut bands a bigger take. You're simply being a skin-flint.
Secondly, this idea that bands can just go on tour and magically make back all their money lost to piracy: not true. For while many musicians do make the majority of their income from gigging and merch, this mindset shows a terrible ignorance of how tours and gigs actually work:
1) Gigging does not come cheap for a band. Indeed, gigs are becoming more of a money sink than ever. Bands still on the club circuit are running more and more into promoters who charge a 'pay to play' scheme. I'll say that again, bands just starting out are being charged upfront by promoters to be able to play club and bar gigs. Here in the UK, this can run up to anything like £250 a pop. That's a lot of moolah, and if people do nothing but download illegally, a lot of bands simply aren't going to be able to stump up the cash to be able to play gigs.
What about larger bands? It's not that much better. While bands on a more mainstream level can actually make money from live shows, they also require a lot more money to set up. Your average band going out on an average tour will have to pay for musical gear, the road crew, lighting rig, a sound engineer, and transport to get everyone and everything around. That all has to be paid for, and record sales help pay for that. If everyone pirates their music in the future, then many 'mainstream' bands will suddenly find themselves unable to finance the tour their fans are clamouring for. You can't hire a roadcrew, soundsystem and transport if you've got no money to pay for those things.
2) Touring and gigging is inexorably tied to record sales. Venues don't look at number of albums torrented when discussing whether to get a band in. The Foo Fighters didn't play at Wembley Stadium because they have a few dozen million hits on The Pirate Bay. Mogwai didn't headline Brixton Academy because they'd knocked up enough downloads in Limewire. Album and song sales tie directly into the venues bands are able to play, and thusly, the amount of income they can make from live shows. If an album sells well, a band will play bigger venues and larger crowds. If an album sells poorly, they'll play smaller venues and smaller crowds. It really isn't advanced economics.
3) Touring takes up a lot of time. When a band goes on tour, they're essentially giving themselves up to a life on the road for anywhere between six months and two years. And while that may sound romantic, try and imagine yourself spending half a year without seeing your family, sleeping either on the bus or in a hotel room every single night, spending hours sitting in a bus every single day, playing the same tunes night after night. While being a musicians certainly has its high points, the touring lifestyle also has a lot of negatives surrounding it too, and to suggest that bands and artists should just chain themselves to it if they want to make any money is a little insulting.
Touring and live shows can be a lot of fun for musicians, and they can make a lot of money from it. But it shouldn't be forced to become a musician's sole source of income just because a bunch of people decided they couldn't be arsed to pay for their music.
Thirdly, this idea that rock musicians are all rich, and therefore shouldn't *****: untrue in the extreme! Yes, I know, we all imagine rockstars to have houses on the Sunset Strip, and have super-model pornstar girlfriends, and snort the purest cocaine off the dashboards of their Ferrari's. Guess what? All those super succesful rockstars you've seen on TV, all the Gene Simmonses, the Jimmy Pages, the Jon Bon Jovis... they're the fucking minority. Saying all rockstars are rich is like saying Bill Gates is loaded, so therefore all programmers must be loaded. Those musicians with the mansions and swimming pools are the very lucky few who managed to get millions of fans to support them. Most other musicians are still slogging away, struggling to break even. Hell, more and more musicians are having to take up second jobs just so they don;t go broke doing what they love. And that's a sorry fucking state to be in...
Fourthly, a lot of people seem to think musicians should adopt the Radiohead approach of letting fans 'pay what they want' for albums. Just no! The reason why Radiohead managed to pull that off is because they were already a multi-million selling band who could finance their own publicity campaign, and already had the fanbase to guarantee a success. Very few bands are in such a privileged position. Despite all that, the majority of people who downloaded the 'In Rainbows' album contributed a grand total of $0 towards it. If musicians are supposed to survive off the milk of human kindness, then pardon me if that teat doen't look all that nourishing.
But my objection goes further than that: there's another term for allowing people to pay whatever they want for your services. It's called begging. According to many people, the job of being a musician should now entail slogging away to create something unique and great, then begging at the door step for whatever the 'fans' can dain to throw their way. I fail to see what is so unique about music that it is the only artform where this is seriously suggested as an economic model. Would you go into an art-store and demand to walk away with whatever painting you like, for whatever price you can be arsed to pay? Would you demand that Wal-Mart or HMV operate a donation box system for purchasing the latest films? Forget what fairytale notions your art or drama teacher may have put in your head: all art is some kind of product. Not everyone may see it as that, and many artists may not emphasise it, but the fact remains that any album is a product created by the effort of an artist. And as such, you have no right to barge in, help yourself to it, then decide to pay however little you feel like towards the artist for their effort. That's not how trade works. The artist creates something, a price is set, if you want it, you pay the asking price. If you don't like it, then don't buy the frackin' record. Just because you think it may be a little expensive, don't try and paint yourself as the injured party, and that you're in some mysterious way in the right for pirating it.
Look, at the end of the day, if you're going to pirate, then pirate. I've got a few pirated albums on my iTunes library myself. But don't, in any way, try to justify piracy than anything other than what it is: selfishness. You're not 'sticking it to the man', you're not 'sending a message'... you're simply taking something for nothing. If you can see that and accept that, then more power to you. But if you're going to labour under the delusion that piracy is somehow 'helping' the music industry, then someone needs to slap the shit out of you.
