Tuesday 19 April 2011

Music piracy: who do we trust?

A few days ago I noted how the problems of the music industry were "complicated".  Above all, the sector's contention that illegal downloading of music was killing music needed to be looked at in more detail.

The problem is actually more one of who to believe.  There are three powerful arguments why we would be right to be sceptical about the music industry's complaints: firstly that they have been making the same claims for 30 years or more; secondly because generally their figures don't add up; and finally because there is a lot of contrary evidence.

Young people have been illegally sharing music since the growth of the mass market cassette recorder in the 1970s.  It was easy and everyone was doing it.  The C90 cassette was ideal as it would fit one album on each side.  No wonder C90s outsold all other formats by a big margin.  Charlie Brooker describes how making your own compilation tapes could form part of your courtship ritual at the time.  By the 1980s the music industry was sufficiently worried to launch a high profile campaign "Home taping is killing music", using the same sorts of figures of lost revenues and jobs that it is deploying now, and reminding us that the process was illegal.

Closer to our own time and government and the music industry continues to produce 'research' to show how 4.73 billion items worth £12 billion were being illegally downloaded in Britain in 2009.  However, the figures don't stand up to scrutiny, as Ben Goldacre made clear in a thorough demolition of the report.  It was not just that there was mis-reporting of the facts (it was actually 473 million items), but also the way in which pieces of data were extrapolated to make alarming headlines about job and revenue losses. 

More to the point is the fact that research is often contradictory.  A Norwegian study, for example, found that illegal downloaders were ten times more likely to buy music than those who didn't.  It seems that the worst 'offenders' are young music lovers, who in turn are the biggest buyers of music.

In the 1970s and 1980s we used to share music (illegally) on cassette.  But if it was any good you would buy the album and then re-recorded the tape.  The stuff you kept on cassette was music you liked but wouldn't pay money for.  Sharing of this kind was the original social networking, with music bringing people together and helping to encourage a booming music industry.

So, album sales are down and the music business is still preaching doom.  Yes, there is illegal downloading, but this has been going on for years.  The industry still hasn't made the case that piracy is causing its problems.  There are a lot of contributory factors.  EMI and Warner, two of the big top four in the industry worldwide are up for sale: has piracy done for them?  It's complicated.

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