Pirating Bringing Down Music Industry

By John Haynes,

The social media internet revolution that has been taking place over the past decade has significantly changed the way we access everything. It is debatable that no industry has been effected more than the music industry. The music industry has expanded exponentially with the discovery of new artists and genres. However, not all of the radical changes that the music industry has experienced have been positive. The world has taken advantage of social media and changed the way that they share music through pirating. In the beginning of the social media revolution, the music industry had high hopes of generating greater revenue than ever before. Now, the music industry finds itself hemorrhaging money due to the popularity of illegally downloading music for free.

The world of the music industry once looked so promising. With social media sites like MySpace and YouTube digging out music that was once “underground,” all sings were pointing up. With tons of new music to advertise and online music stores like iTunes to sell music easily, industry workers were asking themselves, what could go wrong? Well, since 1999 music sales have dropped 47 percent. With the explosion of music pirating, a lot can and has gone wrong.

America was first introduced to illegal media sharing with the founding of “Napster” in 1999. By simply typing in a song or artist name in a search engine, anyone could obtain whatever song they wanted. For two strong years about 80 million songs were downloaded for free and America had fallen in love. The government was quick to react and shut down Napster with copyright infringement charges, but by then it was too late. This opened the flood gates for new programs. With each new program, almost always comes with a new loophole immunizing it from government litigation.

Regarding music pirating, whether it is something people are honest and vocal about or choose not to tell other about, “most of us are criminals,” Lev Grossman says in Time Magazine. Yes, you can take a look around society, your family, your friends, anyone you meet is just as likely to have illegally downloaded one of the 30 billion songs downloaded between 2004 and 2009. The worst news for the music industry is not that people are illegally downloading music in large quantities and are virtually untraceable. The worst news is that pirating is so easy, a caveman could do it. Sorry Geico.

Some may argue that music is a passion and should not be a cash-flow business. However, the 71,060 U.S. workers who lost jobs due to the decline of the music industry may disagree.

The music industry has turned to the government to try and solve the ongoing problem of music piracy. They have been making positive strides in the fight to bring integrity back to the sharing of music with the 2010 shutting down of perhaps the most popular tool for music pirating, LimeWire. A good start yes, but there are a multitude of other ways to obtain music. Similar programs like FrostWire are still prevalent in music downloading. Websites like Dirpy.com allow you to stream audio out of music videos. It will take much time and cooperation before anyone can put a stop to music piracy.

What is perhaps most antagonizing for the music industry and the government is that, in most cases, their is nothing they can do about the illegal downloading of music. A lot of the programs and organizations that allow the illegal downloading of items are in other countries. For instance, the Swedish based website “The Pirate Bay” is one of the most popular ways to legal obtain digital media. Disney once wrote to Pirate Bay asking them to please take their movies off so that people wouldn’t download them for free. Pirate Bay wrote back informing Disney that Sweden does not share the United States anti-piracy laws and that they had no obligation to comply.

All in all, the fight against music piracy has turned into a war of attrition. No matter how many programs the government can shut down, there is always one to replace it. Piracy is not limited to a small percentage of computer geniuses, anyone and everyone can do it. Piracy is hurting the music business and in turn hurting the economy. The bottom line is, if anyone wants to truly put a stop to the illegal downloading of music they will have to tackle the problem individually with the downloader’s themselves.