What are the advantages of music piracy?

Question

It's the topic ive been given on the debate team.

Answer 1

The immediate advantages of music piracy are felt on the consumers/thieves end, namely, they have the music they wanted and still have money in their pocket. Obviously free is better than ridiculously expensive.

I do not advocate music piracy, but I do believe that it has had many benefits, and hopefully will bring on many more. Piracy is a way of "sticking it to the man." The RIAA has been screwing every recording artist and consumer for many many years, and the tables were finally turned on them.

http://www.boycott-riaa.com/facts/truth

The Music industry has been screwing the artists for over 50 years. Many musicians such as U2, REM, The Dixie Chicks, Prince, and others, joined together to call for more rights for musicians. Courtney Love wrote an open letter to musicians and cited these inequalities:

Thousands of successful artists who sold hundreds of millions of records and generated billions of dollars in profits for record companies find themselves broke and forgotten by the industry they made wealthy.

Here a just a few examples of what we're talking about:

Multiplatinum artists like TLC ("Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg," "Waterfalls" and "No Scrubs") and Toni Braxton ("Unbreak My Heart" and "Breathe Again") have been forced to declare bankruptcy because their recording contracts didn't pay them enough to survive.

Corrupt recording agreements forced the heirs of Jimi Hendrix ("Purple Haze," "All Along the Watchtower" and "Stone Free") to work menial jobs while his catalog generated millions of dollars each year for Universal Music.

Florence Ballard from the Supremes ("Where Did Our Love Go," "Stop in the Name of Love" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On" are just 3 of the 10 #1 hits she sang on) was on welfare when she died.

Collective Soul earned almost no money from "Shine," one of the biggest alternative rock hits of the 90s when Atlantic paid almost all of their royalties to an outside production company.

Merle Haggard ("I Threw Away the Rose," "Sing Me Back Home" and "Today I Started Loving You Again") enjoyed a string of 37 top-ten country singles (including 23 #1 hits) in the 60s and 70s. Yet he never received a record royalty check until last year when he released an album on the indie punk-rock label Epitaph."
http://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy2.html

-love her or (more likely) hate her, she does bring up great points.

Piracy is a way of hurting the recording industry more than the band that you like. If you think that album sales are where musicians get their money from, check out this website with an article written by Steve Albini (Produced Nirvana's 'In Utero'):
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic.html

While piracy does hurt musicians and the recording industry in the short term, it could have been the shot in the arm that revolutionized the sales of music.

I believe that file sharing led to more compressed formats for music files. The mp3 format changed the face of music. Now we have ipods that are the size of a postage stamp that can hold more music than our bulky discman ever thought of holding, and it doesn't skip. Music sales are by individual songs or full albums. There is the instant gratification involved, you hear a song on the radio or on the computer while browsing, you click a button and you own it. No more driving out to the mall and picking it up.

I am not saying that the MP3 players wouldn't have been made if there was no file sharing, but I think that it would have taken much much longer for this media to be embraced by the public. File sharing made it immediate. So Apple created a product and a market for this new media. Look at apple's stock prices pre-Napster and now!

Piracy may even cause more quality music to be made. In the past, a musician could create two great songs and ten crappy filler songs and sell an album. Now, people will only download the two good songs and forget the rest. If the musician wants royalties from 12 songs, he better create 12 songs that are worth paying for.

There are more reasons why piracy ended up being a great thing for the music industry as a whole, multi-million dollar lawsuits that went straight to the record companies, but not to the artists.
I'm sure you can think of more. Hopefully this is more than enough to give you fodder for your debate.

I think that we can all agree that piracy is stealing and stealing is wrong. If you want to stick it to the RIAA, buy used CD's and rip them, it's cheaper than paying per download and it's not illegal. It is also apparent that the RIAA is heartless and hurts the artists more than file swappers ever did. Piracy was wrong, but there were positive results that came from it.

Answer 2

Finding rare and unreleased, but quite good and interesting recordings. I used to buy alot of bootlegs from a mom and pop record store, where I live. They don't sell as many bootlegs now, since the industry is cracking down. I used to have some very interesting alternate versions of alot of different artist music. Unfortunately, I sold alot of those bootlegs, when I was short on cash, a few years ago, but I used to have some quite unusual, though very fascinating alternate takes by The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, David Bowie, The Beach Boys, John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Elvis Costello, Pearl Jam, Kiss, and Green Day. My record collection, was for a time, a holy grail for the nerdy record collector.

Answer 3

Exposure! So and so downloaded your song and told so and so to download it. Next thing you know, you get searched for online, and if you are liked, then your album gets bought. If you're not worth $10 then your album gets downloaded. Some people become crazy fans and create their own site about you lol, it's all about exposure.

Answer 4

You need to ask??????? It's stealing. The only advantages are to those who steal the songs and couldn't care less about those of us in this industry who are trying to make a living!!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 5

It gives consumers a cheaper product,thats about the only advantage I can think of

Answer 6

I am extremely curious too about the answer to this question

Answer 7

That is a tricky question.