On Piracy
Friday, 6. November 2009, 13:07:51
You know what the problem is? Musicians only try to get rich quick, and charge too much for their creations. That's why there's so much piracy in the world.
So I went out and had a listen.
I headed to the nearest centre with pirated CD's for sale, and compared the prices there with the prices in a proper music store. The differences were indeed shocking; the going rate of a pirated CD is less than a quarter of that of a real one.
So I bought a stack of CDs with music I'd never heard before. In truth, almost none of these discs I liked, and if the only thing available was the real – expensive – thing, I would probably never have bought it.
Then I talked to the owner of the – legal – record store. He'd been around in the music business for many years, despite not being able to sing 'Happy Birthday' in tune. He said that including royalties, copying a legal disk costs anywhere between one and two English pounds. So where does the difference go to?
So was my daddy right?
I don't think so. You can't blame a nightingale for its song! You can't blame a slug for not being able to appreciate it! It's not the musicians greediness that fuels the piracy, it's the greed of those around the musicians without real skill. The anti-piracy war is mainly led by the music companies, and their managers. People who know how to sell, how to make a profit, but not how to make music.
Like I said, the pirated music I acquired, I would probably never have listened to had I have to pay the full price. Combine that with the greed of the music managers, the solution to piracy is easy: cut out the skill-lacking lackeys. Buy directly from the musicians.
People who happen to have a decent recording studio should make it available to bands in exchange for a signed copy of the resulted disc. Then the musicians copy the discs themselves, and sell them to the world for cost-price. This will drop the average album price to near zero, killing the need and opportunity for piracy.
It'll also eliminate those people living richly off other people's skills, and they'll have to suddenly learn to fend for themselves. This will be a healthy development, for the world, and it'll get the music industry – at least the artistic branch of it - through the credit crisis.
The copyright of this text belongs to the author, known as Ben Trein. Pictures were found on the Internet. If those pictures infringe anyone's copyright, please let me know, and I will remove them. Quotes from the text are allowed, but only if a direct link to this site is provided.
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