The Costanza » music piracy

A change of heart

Tory Regan — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:18:57 +0000

Lily Allen, who formerly believed music piracy was bad, has changed her mind stating she “doesn’t care” if someone burns her albums.

In September, Allen wrote a blog on Myspace critisising bands such as Radiohead and Pink Floyd for their view that file sharing is okay.

But now it appears, in a radio interview Allen has had a change of mind and heart and says “If someone comes up with a burnt copy of my CD and offers it to you for £4, I haven’t a problem with that as long as the person buying it places some kind of value on my music.”

Tory.

Reinventing the wheel to run myself over

Tory Regan — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:45:01 +0000

Image from Sharky_p2p on Flickr.com

Today’s blog is about the reinvention of the music industry. Music is not dying completely, maybe CD’s are dying but music will always live on, just in different forms.

I have two links to post today. But I guess I could do it in two different posts on two different days just to add to my content a little.

I am currently having some issues working out jargon from one link I’ve found. Using abbreviations makes things very hard. Terms like RIAA and DRM are abbreviations a lot of people would have to google repeditively to find out about.

However, this is a good piece about the transformation of the music industry.

My apologies to anyone who is following this blog, I will try and make my posts more frequent. I am also learning a lot about the different ways I can make the blog more visually exciting aswell as add more exciting content.
I’ve just done a quick Google search for a couple of things I could write about and it seems that most of what comes up are blogs. Clearly the topic of music, piracy aswell as a little politics thrown in here or there is a popular topic with bloggers.

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.”
–Oscar Ameringer

Tory.

They believed the lie

Tory Regan — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:44:33 +0000

Over the last few years we have been made to believe the lie that our music piracy is making musicians poor and corrupting the world. But on the 18th of June, just 4 days ago, it was announced that in fact our music piracy is benefitting the world!

Basically, this article from the UK says that some guys from some well thought of US universities are publishing a paper which asserts the benefits of internet piracy.
In my last blog I covered a few of the many reasons why people would want to pirate music. Obviously there are a lot more reasons, both good and bad.

Reading some of these articles makes me realise why I’m a journalist. I have to put these big words and big ideas into little bitesize pieces so that it’s understandable for anyone to read. Right now, I need someone else to put all this complication into bitesize pieces for me!

The basic jist of this article so far seems to be that economists say that the point of copyright, which stops piracy, is so that artists are able to make money off their product, ie: their music.
Their study shows that while a ‘business model’ may be destroyed by the technology of file sharing, artists will still produce new work.

An example of this according to them is that if music becomes free, people may have to pay more to see an artist perform live so that the musician still makes some cash.
I don’t know about you but I’d be happy to pay almost any amount of money to see the bands I love perform live.
My understanding has always been that artists make like 10c off every CD and make most of their money from performing live. Although I’m not sure how true that is but it sounds like if that is true, not much is really changing.

Left to right: Bob Bryar (drums), Frank Iero (guitar), Gerard Way (vocals), Mikey Way(bass), Ray Toro (guitar)

The next point is interesting. What about bands who don’t like live performances? I can see how stressful performing live could be and I personally understand why not every musician would want to follow in the footsteps of a band such as My Chemical Romance who performed live for 3 years straight (I think).

As much as I love this band and was glad they were touring a lot (therefore coming to New Zealand a few times), I do wonder how much of a toll 3 years of touring would take on a person’s mental health aswell as physical health.

Electronic devices such as Ipods and MP3 players have recieved a boost in sales because of ‘file sharing’ and music piracy. I guess this is because people put music from CD’s onto their computers so they can listen to it anywhere they like rather than just where there is a CD player.

Gone are the days of CD Walkman’s where you needed a physical disc to play your music. You can get music files straight from your computer to your ears now.

Physical album sales have fallen which is predictable. However, more albums are being created than ever! This means that music piracy and file sharing have not affected the quantity of music being created even if it’s not being sold in the conventional ways. An interesting point to me is that there has been no research into the quality of the music being released. There may be more of it but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better than CD’s.

The whole paper by the economists can be found here. If you think you can make sense of it.

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” – John F Kennedy.

Tory.

Picture: My Chemical Romance from Quizilla.

Nothing’s going to stop them

Tory Regan — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:33:20 +0000

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.