I was just thinking some more about why I am so ambivalent to the whole "music piracy" thing.
a) people have always shared music and recordings - i.e. I remember making and sharing cassettes before napster came along.
b) music is a product, it should be valued as such. but this also means that the artist needs to accept it, when people chose not to pay for your music.
you have two options now. you either say "well, then I wont publish it" or you say "ok, I'll figure out a way to deal with it".
two examples
- My own band.
I played in various groups, had some connections, sort of new the music scene and had the basic contacts to set up gigs in semi-nice locations etc. We where super ambitious for about a year - got really good (and really bad) press, recorded a live-concert and sold it as an album (no one bought it) played around 25 gigs and eventually fell apart. This is about 5 years ago.
Last year, somebody from Germany uploaded a bunch of my recordings to youtube (some of them from demo-recordings I made in order to show potential bandmembers what I want us to sound like). A friend of mine stumbled upon a copy of our CD in Warsaw about half a year ago.
As the band no longer exists, I sort of smile at this and feel happy that somewhere my music is still appreciated. If my band still existed I would not react by thinking "They did not pay for the CD. Someone should crack down on them for pirating". Rather I would try to contact these people and see if they could help me set up a gig.
As such the internet is an amazing medium, and if people would crack-down on pirates the options I just described would never come about.
- Wir Sind Helden
They are a german band. I think around spring 2003 my girlfriend introduced me to them - she had found out about them from a friend who gave her some mp3 files. I did not really care much for them, but becouse she liked them so much I downloaded some music, and it grew on me. It got no airplay, because, while being very much pop-music it was definitively not mainstream.
That summer we went to a music festival. Wir Sind Helden was still unsigned and unknown when the festival was set up, so they had a timeslot from around 11:30 am to noon, or something like that. The place was packed. As in. there where more people there than came for metallica or placebo who where the main headliners of the festival.
Now realize - this band had next to zero airplay in austria (where I grew up) and their CD was not on the market yet. The only way people new about this band was through the internet.
After that summer, Wir Sind Helden became huge - they are quite a phenomenon IMO.
I heard them play a couple of years later, and the lead singer commented on piracy. She said that she is agains it. She also says though, that she is really confused about it, as she credits a large part of the bands popularity to mp3 files destributed over the internet. She told of her first concerts she gave in Austria:
"When we played [some song, I cant remember which one] all of a sudden everyone started singing along the lyrics. I was really confused - it was our first show in Austria, and our CD was not yet for sale. So I asked the crowd 'How do you know the lyrics' and they said 'We downloaded the music from the internet'"
My point is, that while Wir Sind Helden wants us to buy their CDs, it would be hypocritical of them to demand that governments crack down on music sharing, as music sharing is what made them the phenomenon they are.
ok.
I'm off. Just felt like sharing.
p.