Note: This was written for college in 2021.
Causes & Effects of Music Piracy
With the rise of the internet, there was a significant shift in various industries, including the music industry. This development led to a phenomenon of music sharing over the internet (music piracy), which was viewed as a threat to the income of both musicians, and other members of the industry. This conflict of interests led to various changes in how music is viewed from a commercial standpoint, the relationship of consumers with music, and how it is distributed in a digital environment.
This essay seeks to analyse the causes and effects of music piracy, and how it shapes the current music landscape. Areas that will be discussed include; what is piracy, the economic and ideological driving forces for music piracy, the steps taken by the music industry to negate the influence of music piracy, and the reterritorialization of music piracy into a profitable form.
What is Music Piracy?
Piracy, and in extension music piracy, is the act of sharing and distributing copies of content without the permission of the rights holder. In the case of the music industry, a rights holder would typically be a composer, a recording artist, or a record label. While typically associated with the internet, music piracy began with the copying and distribution of sheet music. Digital piracy initially came to major prominence with Napster.
The unique nature of the internet makes digital piracy near impossible to stop, and any actions against it are difficult to enforce and have deeper effects than just preventing internet piracy.
This is in part due to how the internet functions. For information to be transferred from one place to another on the internet, it is copied countless times, from server to server, computer to computer, database to database. As a result, even a legal transmission of data results in many copies of that data, as the data is copied at every point of interaction. This has many implications for how digital goods are regulated and how piracy is prevented.
From a practical point of view, digital piracy typically takes various different forms. Torrenting or Peer-to-Peer (P2P) “transactions” are one common way in which music is distributed illegally. This manner of piracy involves data being transferred from person to person in a rhizomatic web-like structure. This method is highly decentralised and typically involves mutual exchange of information.
Music piracy takes other forms, such as being uploaded to file sharing websites, or simply being sent from one person to another. Essentially, any form of data transfer can be used for piracy. However, P2P is the most prolific due to its scalability and resilience.
Illustration of rhizomatic structure http://viaartfund.org/grants/the-post-internet-art-institution/
Economic and Ideological Drives
There are clear motivations for music piracy, as well as the backlash against it. However there are also deeper implications of these contradictory motives.
As a consumer, the limits of conventional music acquisition are immediately apparent. There are various limits and restrictions on what a consumer can and cannot obtain, whether it is a lack of physical access, or a lack of financial means to buy music. As the internet developed and the distribution of information became more and more accessible, the former reason diminished but the latter grew, as a wider range of music was obtainable online. With an ever expanding availability of music it became extremely prohibitive and expensive to buy all of the music one would want, so music piracy was one clear solution for a consumer.
However, while being a solution to financial and accessibility issues, music piracy also serves other functions. Quoting Markus Giesler’s paper,
“Whereas the marketplace is about exchanging music as a commodity with outsiders, Napster is about sharing music as a gift with insiders.”
The availability of music, and the mutual giving and receiving involved in music piracy led to a communal gifting system, and in turn a wide community. Whereas music-as-commodity leads to a strict transactional mode of music consumption, music-as-gift breeds a socially productive form, of not only consumption, but of music sharing. Gift giving plays a large role in developing human social relations, but historically it has primarily been a dyadic exchange. With the advent of the internet, what was seen as a wholly dyadic system gave way to a communal, and global, gift system.
As a result, Napster was the first to become home to thriving communities of mutual exchange, rather than communities of mutual consumptive signifiers. This was the case at least prior to regulations.
This was not exclusive to music. The internet as a whole was built on the notion of free exchange of information and data, and open source software, and this allowed many different communities to arise.
The reaction by artists and the music industry was not unwarranted. There is a clear perception, at least from the outset, that music piracy will hurt sales and revenue. There were exceptions, with some artists embracing the culture of free exchange of information, but the majority of the industry was against piracy. This resulted in various different actions being taken.
Steps Taken By The Industry
The music industry took various steps to curb the spread and prominence of music piracy, and many studies were conducted to determine the course of action.
There were a number of studies undertaken that sought out to assess what affected a person’s likelihood of pirating music, and the results showed three main factors; negative incentives, positive incentives, and consumer characteristics.
The characteristics of the consumer played a significant role in determining whether a person would pirate or not. While the risk and ability to pirate is static, some people will pirate whereas others will not. This is due to a person’s own attitude to piracy (ethics or otherwise), and their technological literacy for instance.
Negative incentives entailed perception of increased risk and repercussion for piracy, as well as difficulty to pirate. Negative incentives proved to work to an extent, but weren’t effective for all groups of people. This was due to people’s values surrounding music piracy, as well as their own perception of the risks. These negative incentives failed in being more effective as they did not address the root issues of music piracy, acting more as a symptomatic treatment than a cure.
Positive incentives had the highest level of success in curbing music piracy. These incentives primarily revolved around increasing ease of access for consumers eg. better online services for buying and listening to music, special incentives for online purchase, etc. These incentives proved to be the most effective in reducing music piracy for all groups as it addressed one of the core issues faced by consumers when dealing with online music distribution at the time.
While later research showed that positive incentives were most effective, the industry started with regulations and punitive measures. The first major action taken by the industry was the A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. court case, which resulted in Napster shutting down. This court case marked the beginning of a period of very harsh sentencing for digital piracy. While this curbed piracy to an extent, consumers continued to pirate, however with more discretion.
With the development of digital distribution, the emphasis of punitive measures against piracy gave way to providing better services for online sale of music. Apple’s iTunes revolutionised the market and solidified digital distribution as a means of obtaining music. Buying music itself online did not last as a prominent method of consuming music for long and was soon supplanted with streaming.
Reterritorialization of Music Experience
The transition to streaming is of special interest due to its relationship to music piracy. As the music industry adapted to the conditions of the internet, music piracy became less and less of a concern. Despite this reduction in piracy, the sale of music was still prohibitive to large collections of music, and the music that was sold could itself be distributed. The transition to streaming addresses those issues.
The switch from music-as-service to music-as-commodity fundamentally altered the consumers’ relationship to music ownership and consumption.
This reterritorialization subsumed elements of music piracy into itself to create a more effective means of online monetisation.
Streaming incorporates aspects of piracy in various ways. The three most substantial are;
- Access to near limitless amounts of music.
- Cheap for the consumer.
- Allows easy sharing of music.
Piracy exposed consumers to unlimited music for free on a principle of free exchange. Streaming applies these characteristics to a monetisable platform; it is cheap, gives consumers access to near limitless amounts of music, and allows people to exchange and share music. However, these external characteristics were grafted onto a framework antithetical to the original project.
Music-as-service allows a provider to have full control of music consumption. When music is sold as a commodity, it is a one time transaction and the connection can be severed at any time, and consumption is determined by the consumer. Music as a service inverts the relationship, and the service provider holds the power in the consumption process, and the consumer is at the behest of the provider’s decisions, which are driven by expansion and profit. This affects both consumers and artists using these platforms.
Piracy Today
Despite the shift to streaming, and the less vocal attitude against piracy by the music industry, piracy still exists in various forms. Overt forms of piracy, or “hard piracy” that rely on direct sharing of data between people like torrenting are still prevalent. However, more subtle forms of piracy, or “soft piracy”, have also become commonplace as technological literacy surrounding computers declines among younger generations, due to the simplification of most widely distributed devices.
YouTube has become a popular source of pirated music and is often used as an alternative to conventional streaming. On the platform, music can be listened to for free, and audio from videos can be downloaded with external applications. Music is often uploaded by the artist/label themselves, there are many uploads that infringe on copyright.
The use of ad blockers on free versions of streaming platforms can also be considered a form of soft piracy, as it bypasses the monetisation mechanisms of the service.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the rise and prevalence of the internet fundamentally changed the way music is acquired and consumed. The internet is built on top of the free exchange of information, so the rising usage of the internet led to global consumer gift systems through the use of Peer-to-Peer technology. These technologies contradicted the driving forces of the music industry which required the industry to change rapidly, and drastically. This resulted in punitive measures against piracy, and a shift from the physical ownership of media to ownership of licenses to access music in the form of streaming services. The transition from ownership of the media one consumes, to access to media controlled by a central authority fundamentally changes the relationship to consumption and experience of music for a consumer.
However, despite this complete overhaul, music piracy still exists today, albeit in altered and diminished forms. Large Peer-to-Peer networks still exist, just not to the extent as they had in their infancy, and forms of soft-piracy have developed. While the industry has significantly diminished the impact of piracy, it is impossible to fully prevent.
Bibliography
Giesler, Markus. “Consumer Gift Systems: Figure 1.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 33, no. 2, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 283–90, https://doi.org/10.1086/506309.
Sinha, Rajiv K., and Naomi Mandel. “Preventing Digital Music Piracy: The Carrot or the Stick?” Journal of Marketing, vol. 72, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–15, www.jstor.org/stable/30162196.
Levin, Aron M., et al. “Money for Nothing and Hits for Free: The Ethics of Downloading Music from Peer-To-Peer Web Sites.” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, 2004, pp. 48–60, www.jstor.org/stable/40470124
Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. “Copyright, Surveillance, and the Ownership of Music.” Music on the Move, University of Michigan Press, 2020, pp. 180–201, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.9853855.16.
Kopf, Dan. “How the Music Industry Shifted from Napster to Spotify.” Quartz, Quartz, 22 Oct. 2019, qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-napster-to-spotify/. Accessed 24 Nov. 2021.
