Nothing’s going to stop them
In November 2002, this was posted on the BBC website. The basic message in this article is that Microsoft believe they will never be able to stop music piracy.
I find this very interesting because I had always heard that one day, some government department or the police would come into people’s houses, seize their computer and arrest them for the hundreds of music files they have on there.
Although this article is many years old, therefore no longer news, I didn’t know about it so I wonder how many other people had no idea music companies were kinda ‘giving up’ on catching ‘pirates’.
An idea music makers have had is to make CD’s which cannot be played in computers, therefore people would be slightly disadvantaged when trying to either play the music or copy the music.
Personally I don’t like this idea. I know one of my friends doesn’t have a radio so maybe playing music on her computer would be the only way she could listen to it.
I find playing music on my computer very useful, plus, with a program like LastFM, I can make my own playlists and keep track of everything I play. I recommend Last FM, it’s very interesting to find out what your favourite band REALLY is or rather your most played band.
I like that playing music on your computer, you can play all the music you own, all at once in a particular order or shuffled. You can’t do that with a CD player.
The article says though, that even that, researchers believe will fail.
For me and my friends, downloading music is helpful because in New Zealand you cannot find some bands’ CD’s. If you are into ‘non mainstream’ music, it becomes very difficult to listen to the music of bands you love if there is no way to buy CD’s of that music.
There are shops such as Real Groovy which sell some non mainstream music, however, it is expensive and some music is still not there. This is one shop I will go to to find out a bit about the effects of piracy.
The fact music is expensive is another hitch. Why buy music which is expensive when you could download it for free?
I’m not saying that downloading is a great solution to anything, I know it’s a problem for musicians. But for me, if I’ve downloaded music from a band and I like them a lot, I will try and find a CD that I can buy. Downloading is a great way of getting musicians out there. Aswell as file swapping. My friends and I often show each other bands by swapping songs via MSN because it’s easy to do it that way.
After that it’s up to the person if they want to go and get a hard copy of the music.
There is something very attractive about hard copies of things still. I enjoy hard copies of documents as opposed to seeing them on a screen, I prefer CD’s rather than downloading music, I prefer newspapers as opposed to reading stories on the internet etc.
Sometimes the old fashioned way is just best.
Pictures: Top Right
Bottom Left, taken by myself.
“Music can change the world because it can change people.” -Bono.
Tory.