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| The Pied Piper: happier times, when people trifled with artists' business models at their peril |
"The direct financial losses and effects of internet piracy to the individual musician and the record industry has been one debated over since the emergence of the internet and its usage as a medium to copy and distribute such material. In his article discussing an open letter to one student by David Lowery, Paul Resnikoff weighed in on how the industry has been impacted, utilizing David’s letter as an example of both direct and indirect effects.This note has been prepared by Jani Ihalainen, a Finnish native and recent law graduate of the University of Derby. Jani, who has a keen interest in copyright law, is happy to deal directly with questions. You can email him here.
Paul explains that artists cannot simply tour in order to make up for the shortages resulting from low record sales. Only the top tier of artists, often backed by major labels in the process, will make any profit from this even during dwindling record sales. The sheer costs incurred in traveling around the world, or even round a mere continent, will often not get covered during the tour, let alone generate profit on top of the costs. Touring was seen as secondary and as mere coverage for losses sustained as a result of low record sales. With constantly falling figures in sales today this alone would clearly not be enough. This is a direct result of the fall of the medium in which music is distributed; people are not buying physical media, but rather switching to digital formats, using either legal or illegal means to acquire it. This produces a challenge which the record industry has failed to address, and as pointed out in the article, digital services such as Spotify will not provide an adequate remedy to the situation as things stand in terms of the average musician. Other ways of funding have emerged, such as crowd funding services, like Kickstarter, which provide means for artists to raise funds to record music and distribute it. However such services will only provide funding to a lucky few and would not answer this issue on its own. This might not be in terms of funding alone, but due to the influx of content and the resulting lack of visibility.
Paul attributes this to the attitudes of both consumers and companies. The younger generations born slightly before or during the rise of the internet are used to free access to material and thus buy less music, both in digital and physical formats. One can say the generations with this opportunity see it as a moral right to which they are entitled. One cannot simply pin this on younger people, however, as the sale of media has also dropped among older generations. Both tend to enjoy their media via other means, such as Spotify. Companies like Google and other aggregators do pose problems for individual musicians and the industry at large. A large company is purely interested in profits, not the personal plight of the artist trying to earn his bread through his work – they provide content which is paid for, morals have no place in business.
The sphere in which musicians compete has also changed. TV shows such as X-Factor, which pump out act after act, year after year, under a humongous marketing machine are overtaking the market from the average artist. How can an individual compete with such a Goliath? Odds are they cannot.
Albeit increasingly bleak, and no matter how negatively Paul portrays the prospects of anyone trying to make it in the music industry being, this writer still sees light at the end of the tunnel. Consumers will adapt, and above all, distributers and musicians have to find new ways to benefit from the ease of access and various digital formats in which media can be handled. Once affordable and accessible ways to consume media emerge, consumers will flow towards them and amounts of media pirated should fall, although cannot be fully avoided. Cassettes did not kill the music industry as then was feared, and neither will the internet in the age of the CD".
