Piracy is Theft

Piracy is theft. Or so every DVD I buy tells me. You wouldn’t steal a movie, would you? You wouldn’t steal a car? Or a house? Or Dr Gregory House, star of ‘House’? You wouldn’t steal a diamond in an elaborate heist devised by George Clooney? Would you? So why would you steal music?

Piracy is theft!

But what are you really stealing if you illegally download music? And are the legal alternatives to piracy any better or fairer for musicians and fans? Studentpunch.com investigates.

So let’s start with the harsh realities of the music industry circa 2011. It was reported late last year [Wired Magazine Nov ‘10] that for every song you buy online, download retailers [i.e. Apple’s all powerful iTunes] would send 70% of your money to the record company. Of that seventy per cent, 15% goes to the artist, although that percentage can be increase to 24% if the musician writes and performs their own music. So for every track you buy off iTunes [other music stores are available], a musician, when the royalties of producers etc are taken into account, may get just 10p. Unfortunately, even that pitiful number is, more than likely, very optimistic. When in June 2010 an Eminem lawsuit made public the funding arrangement that Apple used with labels, it was revealed that artists could actually expect closer to 3 or 4p for every 79p download.

As you’re all aware, however, iTunes pricing is just that, for iTunes only and companies such as 7digital.com [who supply HMV.com] and Amazon.co.uk offer individual tracks and albums for well under the magical £7.99 mark. In fact, Amazon’s bargain basement pricing has drawn the unfavourable attention of the musicians themselves. Fleet Foxes hit out on Twitter saying “Been working for nine months on something that will sell for $3.99 on Amazon MP3. That’s about the price of a whoopee cushion.”

So if musicians aren’t happy with the download megastores determining what worth their music holds, can all hope lie with the fans instead?

When Radiohead employed the ‘pay-what-you-want’ pricing model for record In Rainbows, Bryce Edge, the band’s manager said, “If your music is great then people will pay for it.” So, to paraphrase words of the great Kevin Costner, if you build it, will they come? The answer is, well… maybe.

Good news first: over 1.2 million people visited the Radiohead website in the first twenty nine days of the album's release and the average price paid for the record was $6 [around £3.60 based on today's exchange rate], jumping up to an average of $8 for American downloaders. However, and here’s the kicker, 62% of people who downloaded the record paid exactly nothing. Zilch. Zero. Include all these people, these freeloaders, into the fold then that $6 average drops to just $2.26 [£1.38 in proper money]. There are ten songs on In Rainbow and, after doing some quick maths, that works out at just under 14p per track. So appealing to fans directly does work out better, but only just. It’s not hard to see then why when releasing 2011’s The King of Limbs Radiohead reverted to a standard price of £6 [$9] and both the aforementioned record and In Rainbows were released on digital stores.

The question that now needs to be asked is: how big of a risk was the ‘pay-what-you-want’ model for Radiohead, one of the world’s biggest bands? Does this pricing [or lack of pricing] model work for other artists?

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame said of the ‘pay-what-you-want-model’: “I hate this concept…Asking people what they think music is worth devalues music…This is your art! This is your life! It has a value and you the artist are not putting that power in the hands of the audience – doing so creates a dangerous perception issue…Don’t be misled by Radiohead’s In Rainbows stunt. That works one time for one band once – and you are not Radiohead.” Trent’s right and has been proved right by the facts and numbers that the Radiohead ‘experiment’ provided; people might be more tempted to try your product, sure, but only for free. Reznor learnt from the Oxfordshire band and, when releasing new music from both Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels, employed a two-step pricing model. He’ll [probably not personally but, you never know] give you the album for free but at web-stream quality [192kbps] and if you like to enjoy your music, say in crisp clear 320kbps, then you have to pay. You pay your money, you take your choice. Seems fair.

Music website www.bandcamp.com stands somewhere in between these two music models mentioned above, and has becoming a popular and successful way for musicians to sell their music both digitally and physically. Artist’s pages allow a user to stream music and then buy their music, with the musician setting the minimum amount you have to pay whether that be free, 50p to cover the PayPal costs, a fiver, or more. According to www.bandcamp.com, who take 15% commission on digital sales, over the last thirty days alone, artists have made just over US $617,000. Amanda Palmer is just one of the many success stories that have come out of www.bandcamp.com. Already a successful artist with the Dresden Dolls, although without a record label, Palmer released an EP of, coincidently, Radiohead covers on the website for a minimum of 84 cents [51p]. Palmer went on to sell $15,000 worth of music and merchandise within the first three minutes of the album being on sale and sold over 4000 copies of the EP by the end of the day.

But we all live in 2011 (well, except for the residents of Fraserburgh who still think it’s 1973), and as such we don’t have to ‘buy’ or even steal music anymore to hear all the music we want. It’s all about the stream.

In May of this year it was announced that digital music service and current king of streaming in the UK, Spotify, was teaming up with little known social networking site Facebook to provide the European contingent of its 500 million users with their music needs. For Spotify it’s Western Europe then the world. But as Spotify gets more music [currently they offer upwards of 13 million songs], more usable [now you can sync your iPod to Spotify rather than iTunes] and more popular [10 million users and growing], the more I get concerned because Spotify is horrible. See, that got your attention.

Yes, Spotify is regarded as one of the saviours of the music industry, pushing the concept of legal music back into the public consciousness, but at what cost to the artist? It was reported widely back in 2010 that Lady Gaga made, over a six-month period, just £197 off 1 million plays of her track ‘Poker Face.’ And that’s Lady Gaga, who I’m told is very popular these days. On average the minimum rate for songwriters royalties per stream is 0.085p, which works out at around £850 for every 1 million plays.

So are Spotify really the good guys of the new age of music or does, as Led Zeppelin once said, the song remain the same? It appears to me that Spotify is just another company perpetuating the age-old relationship between record company and artist in much the same way iTunes and the like have for the last decade. However, perhaps in light of the unfavourable ‘Gaga’ numbers, Spotify is moving away their free music model and pushing harder towards subscription-based services. Offering ‘free’ music via Spotify has been great for the casual music fan but has always been a problem in a more general sense for three reasons:

No album in the history of music was ever designed to have an advert for Glasgow University half way through it. Adverts ruin the flow of music.

Giving away music means zero money for artists, the more you pay for your music the more artists get for the music. At least, that’s the hope.

It’s not cheap to licence and pay royalties on 13 million songs, and in the end Spotify is a business.

Spotify subscriptions are at least a step in the right direction and figures show that 1 million paying Spotify users in Sweden now pay the main income for that country's artists, so it appears that the service over time is becoming fairer for musicians. £9.99 [the price of one physical CD, lest you forget] per month for all the music you want, whenever you want and on your phone is a bargain. So stop complaining that now you can only listen to a song five times now and invest in your music, even if you do so selfishly to feel better than everyone else.

Spotify is not your only option in the world of ‘cloud’ [the not so fancy world for internet based storage] streaming. Grooveshark.com has a pretty widespread catalogue of music, especially for a predominantly free service, although, like Spotify, you can pay to play your music from your phone and remove the advertisements. Grooveshark.com, for most people out there, is a great choice as a secondary service to be used when you hit the limits of your free Spotify account.

For those out there who like discovering new music, may I advocate the use of Last FM. Whether online, as an app on your PC, phone, or on your X-Box 360, Last FM is a ‘radio station’ defined by your music tastes and recommending new music along side old favourites. Not the service to use if you want to listen to a specific record all the way through, but great for those who consume vast amounts of music and live life on the shuffle.

Over the next year the big technology companies, Apple, Amazon and Google, will all have cloud based music services. None are available in the UK as of yet. However, Apple’s iCloud will launch in October and you can’t imagine the others being too far behind. These services work in much the same way: you upload your own music [i.e. from iTunes] into the cloud whereupon these tracks become available to every device you own [i.e. your iPod or Android based phone] for you to stream via Wi-Fi or 3G.

No matter how much technology progresses, whether you access your music from the cloud, your phone, your computer or MP3 player, my advice remains the same; if you like a musician and want them to make more music you have to support them financially. So if you get an album off Piratebay instead of iTunes, or if you burn a CD off a mate instead of trekking out to HMV in the rain, try and make the effort to buy a band’s merchandise or, when they come and play in your town, go see them. Music isn’t made for free; musicians have to earn a living or no more music for you. So, in whatever medium or form, just support them. It’s only fair.

Daniel W. Raper.