What began as an exploration into the role, function and impact of intellectual property rights, copyright as part of this week’s Words, Beats and Life, Inc.’s Bootleg Festival panel Radio Retaliation: Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion became a powerful debate over who suffers most from bootlegging, or “illegally” distributing copyrighted materials. The panelists included: Nick Schonberger (scholar/curator), Michelle Smith a.k.a. Noodles (On-air host, WPFW/Cookiewear) and Naji Mujahid (emcee), Kenzo Hakuta (Dir., City of God’s Son) and Dr. Jared A. Ball (professor/founder of Freemix Radio). The discussion’s moderator was Bomani “D’Mite” Armah, “Poet with a hip-hop style.” Hear/download the audio below.
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And one positive example of re-appropriation of the culture comes in the form of Head-Roc’s remix of The Corner.
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Perhaps i am ignorant, or perhaps due to my culture i am not one to give up or give in to the powers that be. However, no matter who downloads the music etc vs spending a few dollars to purchase the product it is the artists who labored and sacrificed to make the product who suffers most.
Sure, you can have some mega rich company like napster etc who tells us that when we allow downloads then the artist benefits etc? How so when the moola, dinero, centavo, dollars are not going to his her pocket?
This is not rocket science;
There is a point that is often missed when record labels and the RIAA talk about the power of illegal downloads to suck profits out of the music industry. The typical argument is pretty simplistic, and it goes something like this:
Back in the old days, people used to purchase the music they wanted to listen to. When Napster and other peer-to-peer downloading networks arrived, people no longer had to pay for what they could download for free. Thus, with people buying less music, record labels make less money, and the music industry as a whole loses out because there is less money to pay artists, thus there are less artists, thus there is less music. The RIAA, the music industry’s trade group, says illegal downloading is responsible for the recent loss of profits:
When 23 percent of surveyed music consumers say they are not buying more music because they are downloading or copying their music for free, we cannot ignore the impact on the marketplace.
However, I’m not quite convinced that illegal downloading affects the record industry’s core profit centers as much as they like to think it does. However, as a Cuban whose family has won a Grammy, i am someone who takes it personal when music from the Black community is taken for free..Its like another slap in the face.
On the other side..there is this according to Simon Goldman my homie from NY
The record industry makes its money on hits. According to some, 90% of records put out by the industry fail to make a profit. So, those records that are real hits, say selling over 1 million copies, are the ones that are really driving the profits of record companies. But people download much more than just the hits, and so the illegal downloading phenomenon might not be cannibalizing as much of the record industry’s profits as it might lead you to believe.
Last year, about 15 billion songs were downloaded illegally through peer-to-peer networks. I’ve attempted to roughly calculate how many of those were hit songs. According to PeerMind, a website that tracks peer-to-peer download numbers, the total number of downloads for the top 10 downloaded songs averages at about 12+ million per week, or 15+ million per year. That means that hit song downloads account for only about 11% of all music downloaded in a year. Hit songs, while being the profit center of the record industry, clearly only accounts for a small portion of peer-to-peer traffic.
So what else are people downloading? Well, in my experience, people download a wide variety of different songs. You might pick up that one song that’s been stuck in your head for a week, or download the track that your mother used to sing around the house in 1979. You might download a song written by a local band you heard the other night, or a song from 10 years ago your friend just reminded you about. You might download a live concert, or a remix. People might download all sorts of songs, and none of them might be current hits. Peer-to-peer music sharing exhibits intense long tail characteristics, in that most of the activity is not focused on a few big hits, but spread out along the rest of the collective music catalogue. Instead of millions of people downloading one song, millions of people are each downloading millions of different songs. Eventually, those small, spread out numbers add up to the big download figures we see above.
I don’t think the long tail effect of illegal downloads is necessarily bad for the music industry. How many of you would go out and buy an album just for that one song your mother used to sing back in 1979? I think it is a fair assumption to say that without peer-to-peer downloading, most people would just go without the little bits of music they were looking for. I don’t think too many would be out running to the record stores, cash in hand, just for a few old tracks. I remain unconvinced that the record industry is losing a lot of money on these long tail downloads. If they make their money off of their hits, why get all up in arms about the downloads taking place downstream of the major artists. Clearly, downloading of major hits hasn’t helped record sales (or maybe it has, that’s a discussion for another time), but as most of the activity is concentrated away from the major artists, why does the record industry maintain that all illegal downloads are a threat?
Illegal downloading on the long tail might actually help record companies in the long run. If you sample a long-forgotten artist and really like the work, you might be tempted to actually buy a record. In fact, some studies have concluded just that, alleging that people who share music files spend four and a half times more on legal music than their non-downloading peers. The long tail downloading phenomenon can and should be seen by record labels as an innovative and comprehensive promotional tool. People can easily sample music across a vast catalogue of recordings, far more than you can find in any record store, and they can easily get turned onto new favorites in the process. Instead of suing customers for downloading what looks like to be mostly unprofitable tracks, why don’t record labels concentrate on turning those long tail browsers into paying customers. I’m pretty sure that can be accomplished without lawsuits.
As someome who understands law. I do not accept this theory..Its still high tech robbery and it hurts the artists more than the industry