Poll: How Do You Justify Music Piracy?

[spartan231490]

I don`t think that stealing can be justified. As for the artists that just started, piracy can be a good thing, it can help them gain some popularity = more sales.

So does youtube, and that's legal. Also, the artist is in control, he can remove it whenever he wants.

I agree about not justifying it. It's wrong. Don't do it.

 

[ImperialSunlight]

If I didn't, I wouldn't listen to music at all because I have more pressing things to spend my money on (games). Its not stealing if no value is lost through it. Also I plan to buy more music officially when I get a job.

 

[Tiger Sora]

So long as your wearing an eyepatch while doing it. Pirate away I say.
I don't endorse anything though.

 

[2012 Wont Happen]

OP snip

As a musician, I feel that the current system of copyright laws is incredibly backwards. Way too much protection for the corporations, not nearly enough for artists in some areas but a bit too much in others, and almost no protection for the aspiring artist, the person being inspired by the consumed artwork.

I'm not a current pirate, but most of my early inspiration in my music came from listening to albums that, were it not for having them accessible for free through piracy, I would have never listened to. In turn, during the time I pirated things, I tended to spend a lot more money on music or music related things. I would download a bands discography that I otherwise would have never bought any of the music from as I wouldn't have been able to afford all their albums(I'm not a song buyer, or even an album listener. I listen to bands, learn their music from their early days and see how they progressed through their albums), and eventually either go to their shows and legitimately buy as many of the pirated albums as possible if they were of high quality. If a band was bad, I just deleted their stuff to save the hard drive space and bought the same amount of their stuff that I would have if I had not pirated it - none.

Honestly, while I would prefer that copyright laws simply be changed, I think that in the current legal situation music "piracy" is one of the best ways for aspiring artists to continue being inspired and as something that, in the end, results in bands making more money than they would if piracy did not exist. I just stopped because they kept shutting down my internet. I'm not going to outright encourage piracy because I respect the Escapist enough to conform to its pretty reasonable wishes not to encourage illegal actions on their forums. However, I will say that, personally, I find it to be a force of good within the music industry.

post script - If you're wondering why I quoted you directly, even though by default responses are directed towards the OP, its because some people around these parts have a bad habit of not reading through their own threads past page three. I figure if I'm gonna take the time to respond to something with a few paragraphs, I might as well try to get it seen.

 

[McMullen]

So I read that article on anonymous and Gene Simmons, and apparently they (Anonymous isn't really a group, just a bunch of unrelated guys who think its cool to go under the same name) are mad at Gene Simmons for wanting to sue everyone who pirates music, but honestly, I think this would be a good idea. Maybe not everyone, but people who distribute pirated music, sue a bunch of them, and then that will send a good message.

I understand that many musicians are rich and don't 'need' all the money they get but what about newer artists who are just starting out? How about the many people involved in the music making process, there are many people who need to be paid and a lot of people in the music industry have lost their jobs because of piracy.

Also, from the point of view of some guy on a computer, I'm sure its easy to say "I wouldn't care" but if you were really a musician, you would care that people are taking your music which many artists consider a part of them that they spent a LOT of time on, and then people just steal it.

So I wanted to know, with my reasoning in mind, how is piracy of music (We are just talking music) justified and made okay? Do you feel 'entitled' to somebody else's work?

NOTE: I'm not sure how to delete a poll so I just changed it to have no real options because the only thing a poll did was have people answer with no reasoning whatsoever.

I'm sure someone has brought this up already, but what you are talking about in the first paragraph has been happening every year since the mid nineties. It hasn't worked, and in fact the lawyers spamming lawsuits have recently started getting in trouble for it.

Second, I am an artist whose work has been pirated. I passed the word along when I found out, but I am confident that there are larger trends affecting my livelihood than piracy. I'm not going to panic over it.

As for my opinions on piracy in general, I think that at the very least it's a dick move, and nothing to be proud of or righteous about. A pirate has about as much reason to be proud of their piracy as a healthy, capable 40 year old has reason to be proud of sleeping on his mom's couch for the last and next 5 years.

That said, there are things about the media and software market that are so horribly wrong and unfair to consumers that it's hard to imagine them being worse. If there were a balance between businesses and their consumers, the Project Manager at Microsoft who signed off on the first-generation Xbox 360 for release would have been fined just as heavily as the kid who pirated a few hundred DVDs. So would the people at Microsoft who chose not to make the warranty for Red Rings of Death a lifetime one. Even though Microsoft can put out a product with a ~30% failure rate, they were never held fully accountable for wasting their customer's money. A pirate on the other hand is fined for many, many times the financial damage he or she actually caused.

So yes, piracy is wrong, but the current situation is analogous to the police cracking down on speeders and litterers while completely ignoring all the drunks on the highway. I think that some balance needs to enter the market before we worry about piracy, and I also think that people would be more willing to act like respectable consumers if they knew they were going to be treated as such by respectable companies.

 

[haddaway234]

Hate the poll, could've at least left Yes/No.

While I'm sure no one condones theft, musicians (reasonable and rational, even if not successful ones) must account for some margin of piracy within their projected sales targets.

Remember, they don't just get money from CD purchasers and iTunes subscribers, they also sell concert tickets, make paid appearances on television and in public venues, not to mention those that use their music in other mediums such as film and television commercials.

So, you justify it by the fact that no one has a CD player anymore (dedicated device), with the exception possibly being in your car, but even they use MP3 players now, everyone has MP3s, and players for them, and the only outlet to buy MP3s is run by the evil Apple!
If Amazon would get their act together, and release their MP3 store to the world, or if Android twigged they could make a lot of money from it, I'd love to buy plenty of music, perhaps even hundreds of dollars worth, but I refuse to use Apple's "you're an idiot, do as we tell you" technology, so for now I rip my old CDs, have songs on here I didn't download, but I have no idea who gave them to me, and when a song comes out that I'm really really interested to listen to, I use YouTube and grab it from there.

It's that simple, if the market doesn't capture its consumers well enough, the black market wins.

I had a proper poll, but it just detracted from the thread.

 

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Gene Simmons?...the man approved every piece of schlocky merchandise that could be thought of in the quest for mo' money. Maybe I'm out of line, but I'd put more stock in the opinions of a musician who doesn't have his own action-figure, someone whose face wasn't on lunchboxes...it's clear what his allegiances are.

Seriously though, how do you justify anything? I sold an Epiphone Les Paul(the custom model, a perfectly good guitar)to buy a Gibson Les Paul, and paid hundreds of pounds to do so. If the adverts are to be believed, that money would have fed alot of needy people...saved alot of lives. But that couldn't have been further from my mind.

Point being. If I don't care about that...which really does matter. It would be pretty silly of me to get too emotional over the plight of musicians.

I'd describe the situation as "unfortunate", certainly not "evil", and it's a circumstance that the music industry itself has helped to cultivate by screwing their customers and their artists for decades. How many times did you buy an album to discover the 2 singles were good and the rest was essentially filler? If you've bought records, you've been burned that way.

The consumers have power now, they can better shield themselves from buying crap that they only think that they want, and they understandably like it.

-Yowza!-

The Neil Gaiman defense.

Thank you very much.

This too. The promotional power of piracy is enormous, provided it's material that people genuinly do want.

 

[JochemDude]

This is always such a though moral thing, I mean I work in the music industry and yes we notice it a lot. You see all that music that we hate, it's mainly because that is a safe way of making money. There is no room for larger artist to innovate anymore it's just too risky. Only small independent labels can do that.

I do think piracy is to blame for it, but it takes effort from both sides to change that. Prices need to go down if we ever want to see that changing, if people find it expensive they will try to find other ways to get it and I can't blame them for that. Before it can change, even 'cheap' people should find it cheap enough to go out and buy it. Which is the main problem, because now it's free for them. Customer support people, customer support those people can possibly be motivated if they get a special treatment with it. I once tried that with a little dutch band who had just made a album, I suggested to put a nice flag with the band logo in the CD package. I think if people could get like small and Non-digital goodies with it, a lot more people would actually go out and buy it.

 

[Lionsfan]

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.

/thread


Seriously, it sickens me whenever I hear people try and justify Piracy as an alternative to buying. The ONLY time I make exceptions is if it's impossible to get the album anymore, but your post pretty much summed up every point I've ever thought about at random times

 

[blaqknoise]

A lot of bands get noticed more because of piracy. Music can easily be passed around and the bands fame grows.

 

[Veylon]

The only music I've been pirating is video game music, and that was back in the early 00's. I mean, where the heck else could you get the soundtrack for Megaman 2 or Ogre Battle?

 

[googleback]

Piracy can be abseloutley devastating, and it can also make little difference. I hate it personally, ESPECIALLY in the music industry. its very easy to do with music which is sad. it's created a very factory line kind of mentality within it, kind of like video games, people take less risks now...

 

[JasonKaotic]

As I've seen someone say somewhere before (it may have been here), stealing would mean the owner loses what you're taking. Piracy just gives you a free copy of it.
Consider me here. I'm 16. I don't have a job, therefore I don't get income (well, I get £5 a week from pocket money, but that isn't as much normal people). So there isn't really much chance of me being able to buy much music at all. Therefore, I download it.
Artists shouldn't care so much about slight money losses anyway (or big ones). Music is art. It isn't considered wrong at all to save a picture of the Mona Lisa from Google Images onto your computer, so why is it so bad to download music?

 

[googleback]

As I've seen someone say somewhere before (it may have been here), stealing would mean the owner loses what you're taking. Piracy just gives you a free copy of it.
Consider me here. I'm 16. I don't have a job, therefore I don't get income (well, I get £5 a week from pocket money, but that isn't as much normal people). So there isn't really much chance of me being able to buy much music at all. Therefore, I download it.
Artists shouldn't care so much about slight money losses anyway (or big ones). Music is art. It isn't illegal to save a picture of the Mona Lisa from Google Images onto your computer, so why is it illegal to download music?

because then everyone would do it and they'd make next to nothing. everyone would have to switch to donation based sales, some might make quite a bit but most would just fade out and never get anywhere.
piracy is most common amoung people of your age but as you get older i think you'll want to pay for your music (particularly when you're working because there'll be no excuse then) most people I know did. even those that downloaded all their music before, pay for it now.

of course don't see it at all as justified, just not as bad as someone who can afford it.

 

[JasonKaotic]

because then everyone would do it and they'd make next to nothing. everyone would have to switch to donation based sales, some might make quite a bit but most would just fade out and never get anywhere.

But like I said, if you saved a picture of a painting onto your computer that would be perfectly fine, when it's really no different to downloading a song.

I understand why some people are against piracy, there's just more to it.

 

[loc978]

While I agree that there's no real justification for music piracy, I'd also like to point out that "suing the pants off of the pirates" is a wee bit overboard. Fine 'em, convict 'em of a fairly serious misdemeanor, sure... but most of these cases just go overboard [http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_324000.html].

Spoiler: at least one wealthy musician agrees with me

 

[inquisiti0n]

Because musicians are twats.

/notsrs


But if someone can legally watch the music video or song on youtube for free, how is it any different from downloading the song?

From a technical perspective, when you stream a video, the content still goes onto your harddrive (into the temp folder), so really, what's the difference between that and just downloading the song while cutting out the middleman (the web browser)?

 

[Dyme]

Pirated music is free advertising. If people like what they hear they are more likely to buy it. I would never buy music that I don't know already.

 

[googleback]

because then everyone would do it and they'd make next to nothing. everyone would have to switch to donation based sales, some might make quite a bit but most would just fade out and never get anywhere.

But like I said, if you saved a picture of a painting onto your computer that would be perfectly fine, when it's really no different to downloading a song.

I understand why some people are against piracy, there's just more to it.

Not particularly, bad example, Who's going to earn money from the mona lisa? not the artist, he's been dead for centuries. The plain and simple fact is you AREN'T paying for it. The people who's livelihoods it is to bring that to you for a fee aren't getting their fair pay. So no there isn't more to it.

People act like there's such a grey area between stealing and piracy. Not to the artist there isn't. not now the internet is the main forum of sale. so what if you didn't steal the CD? (cd's are SO cheap to replace) You pay for the music. that's what you want and what they provide. for a price that you decide not to pay. That is stealing, straight from the source.

 

[googleback]

Because musicians are twats.

/notsrs


But if someone can legally watch the music video or song on youtube for free, how is it any different from downloading the song?

From a technical perspective, when you stream a video, the content still goes onto your harddrive (into the temp folder), so really, what's the difference between that and just downloading the song while cutting out the middleman (the web browser)?

you purchase the right to ownership which you do not have with an illegal download, you also don't have a hard copy that you can take anywhere when you watch it on You tube.

That's like radio on demand, not an actual copy of the track.