Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Illegal copying destroys life of artists
Recently, my friend asked me a good question about the illegal copying. He said, "Isn't it bad to download a copy of music on a website that distributes illegal copies because it's the same with borrowing CD from other friend and downloading albums from the CD on iTune? " It was hard for me to answer the question, but I recall one news story that happened in Japan. The news said that illegal copies were spreading throughout Japan, and many music industries went bankrupt. Artists are seriously poor because they can't earn enough money for their lives. It's time to think about the lives of artists rather than deciding whether a method of copying is illegal or not. When you really like an artist, you just buy a CD with his album. It costs only 15 bucks. After you buy it, the life of the artist will be better, and the artist can have more opportunity to be creative and exciting with a new song and style. The more we support them by paying the full price of their albums, the better music we will get in the future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
After watching the OS revolution yesterday in class, I'd be curious to see what happens to the music industry if copyrights were removed.
ReplyDeleteI don't recall the exact figures, but from what I've read, about 70% of the proceeds from a 99-cent music sale on iTunes go to the record company, and an additional 15-20% go to Apple, leaving a relatively small portion for the artist.
ReplyDeleteArtists definitely need to paid for their work, but when we buy records through the traditional sources, they aren't really getting much. I've heard people suggest that the truly ethical thing to do is to pirate music, and then buy a T-shirt from the artist's website, which theoretically puts more money in the artists' pockets.
Personally, I don't agree with that, (it's hard to justify breaking the law) but it is something to think about. Record companies are as much to blame for starving artists as pirates are.
I have a difficult time agreeing with the idea that pirating hurts the music industry when there are so many hundreds of thousands of successful bands despite (more likely because of) it. Pirating explodes popularity for well-liked bands, and gives massive (otherwise non-existant) exposure to underground music artists. Stealing music is definitely not ethical, and needs to be prevented, but that is why I think Spotify, Pandora and Grooveshark are great. I don't think the argument that "lives of artists are being destroyed by pirating" has any more meaning than the argument "industrialization destroys the lives of farmers". Some minority always gets hurts, while everyone else thrives and benefits.
ReplyDelete