Moon & Back Music

So you’ve dusted off your Pirate Hat, received dozens of albums for free, supposedly cheated companies and individuals out of their hard earned, and what’s worse: You’ve pissed off Lilly Allen.

After all these years of legal threats (and in some cases promises) with the apparently continued decline of the music industry just where do we now stand? With Lilly Allen claiming she will cease to create music (you decide if this is a bad thing) due to the loss of revenue from internet downloads some musicians are beginning to voice opinions from the other side of the fence. Nelly Furtado recently expressed her non-dismal attitude towards P2P users going as far as to express happiness at the thought of just anyone listening to her music. Natasha Bedingfield has also jumped on the bandwagon explaining that as long as people get to hear her music then its job done, but then she’ll take what she can get these days.

We are all well aware of the Napster decline that really that got the legal to-and-fro ball rolling with what must surely be the most frequently committed crime on the planet. As time has gone on it seems to be the downloader that has come out on top. With 9 million file sharers the music industry reports a 20% loss of revenue since 1999, but a report a couple of years ago suggested the exact opposite. This wasn’t a fantasy tale created as a last ditch get-out-of-jail-free card created by the men behind the fated Pirate Bay website. This was Harvard Business School. But hey, what do they know.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee has clearly decided to make up for his ridiculous name by publishing findings backed-up by real life clever stuff to prove that actually the music industry has not lost a single penny and may even have gained a little income out of the P2P phenomenon. The theory goes that the majority of downloading is done by the younger generations whom good ol’Felix refers to as ‘money-poor but time-rich’. This means that the music industry has lost nothing as without the internet these users wouldn’t be able to afford the music anyway.  Surely this is a little off the mark, hasn’t pop music largely been squared at this demographic for the best part of forty years? This, apparently trivial fact to Ober, has not deterred him from pressing on. His other conclusions draw that actually older users will then download one or two tracks as a ‘sampler’ before deciding whether to buy the full product. Whilst this may be true in some cases it seems unlikely to have really captured the bigger picture, it has certainly captured the attention of the music industry though, as they slowly watch their entire efforts setback a little further and begin pulling out hair at will.

Canada seems to have found some leeway applying levies to digital media products such as CD-Rs atoning for the fact they may be used to create illegally downloaded CDs, with the proceeds funding musicians and songwriters. The tax was also applied to mp3 players but was soon found to be a breach of their own laws. You’d think they’d know.

Our own government has so far made mostly empty threats about removing the internet rights of those who continue to repeat offend. The law falls more heavily upon those that actually rip and upload music to the internet. A few years ago Gordon Brown almost fell afoul of the intricate copyright laws surrounding certain recordings after mentioning in an interview that he had the Beatles catalogue on his iPod. His predecessor could face a war crimes tribunal but this guy’s worst crime is wanting to listen to Ringo in the car. Hardly a cause for concern. The current administrations latest proposal is a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ strategy. Repeat downloader’s will be served with two notices, restricted bandwidth and eventually banned from the internet altogether. Unsurprisingly this has been met with opposition from the ISPs. As with most things the USA leads the way in suing people for, well just about everything really.

Of course aside from the legal ramifications of downloading there is the moral issue. Is downloading music affectively stealing? As we are reminded all too cheerfully at the start of some bargain bin DVDs we wouldn’t steal a car, so on and so on. The argument by those looking for ethical redemption advocate that music should be free, it is a natural process and that it is their right to listen to it. Surely apples are also a natural thing of the earth but we wouldn’t walk out of Tesco with a bagful without paying first. Essentially the greater problem in all of this is ease of use. Downloading the odd song here and there can be done without problem by even the most computer illiterate of people, whilst getting your head around torrents isn’t exactly rocket science for the technophobes. If you put candy in front of a baby will it not take it?

Whether you believe that music should be free or you hate the freeloaders, downloading is a very real problem for a lot of corporations and no amount of name-your-price Radiohead experiments ever make big enough ripples in the pond. In the end we don’t hurt the big companies enough to worry them massively, we don’t even majorly affect the superstars (including Lilly Allen) but it’s the little guys that feel the force. Fledgling musicians looking to make a couple of dollars for all the late night, backroom bar gigs, they played honing their skills are beginning to find increasingly that this just isn’t a sustainable career path anymore. The number of us downloading is holding firm and very rarely is there ever a twang of remorse, but at least now with the meteoric rise of Spotify and the added option of buying the tracks DRM-free we can begin to repent for the musical sins of the past. For the second time during Viva La Vida, Jonathon from Spotify interrupts to deliver me his special message, but it sounds more like a message of hope for the future as maybe, just maybe, music can find its feet again.

‘Hi this is Jonathon from Spotify, all is forgiven my child.’