Since the use of the internet, many people have been attempting to make buying music obsolete. Individuals are now able to access music for free in the convenience of their own home. This is causing many problems for the artists who create the music as well as the record labels which sell the music. As the years progressed, this has also led to the downfall of software companies, book publishers, and television industries. Although it may not be evidently clear, illegal downloading negatively affects us all.
The start of illegal music downloading began with the start of Napster. Napster is known as “The most infamous file swapping utility/company” (“NAPSTER definition”). The site uses what is called peer-to-peer file sharing. This is when people download music that other people have uploaded. Once Napster was taken off the internet, a similar type of file sharing was created through the use of torrents. Bit Torrent, a popular program used to download these torrents, describes torrent use:
As you download a file, Bit Torrent places what you download on upload for other users; when multiple people are downloading the same file at the same time they upload pieces of the file to each other. Bit Torrent pieces together the file you are downloading, to where the first part of a file you get may be the last part someone else gets. As you continue to retrieve the file, Bit Torrent also uploads data to other users. For example, a person with 98 percent of the file done is directed to the people with the 2 percent of the file they still need. (Wikipedia; 2008)
Oink, a site that was widely known for its torrent use, was used by over 180,000 people making it one of the largest torrent sites on the internet. On October 23rd, 2007, the twenty-four year old man believed to be running this site was arrested and the site was closed and put under investigation. As this sites servers were seized, others were made and the illegal downloading continued. According to a news report, “Digital music sales will surpass CD sales in five years” (Digital to Lead Music Sales in Five Years; Paragraph 1). This poses a large problem for record industries and for artists themselves who will soon lose money by creating albums. As music and software become available on the internet, bands are learning how to produce their own music cost effectively by illegally downloading software and then the music they are creating is being illegally downloaded by their fans. Pretty soon, this is going to put many out of a job and record companies are going to be obsolete.” You may be asking yourself, How does this effect me? Well, The answer is simple. As CD sales decline, the production of the materials will decline as well. This will cause prices to increase which will continue to cause deterioration in sales. Soon enough, CDs will no longer be produced and we will rely on the internet for our music needs. This will leave computer illiterate consumers at a loss.
While some people see music downloading as wrong, others believe that it is a right to be able to share music freely among each other. “I think that music downloading is so out of hand that it should be left alone, instead of wasting all this money to fix a problem,” says Andrew Maas, “People are always going to be finding new ways to share their music with each other.” Janis Ian, a professional musician says this,
“There is little evidence that online music sharing is financially harming musicians, and plenty of evidence that it is benefiting them. The recording industry has objected to every new consumer recording technology—including VCRs and tape recorders—but each new technology has ultimately helped artists by enabling more people to hear their work.”
This is a perspective that many people just like Janis have. They think that if more people hear the artists’ music, they will make more money in the long run. However, I think that this will decrease the artists’ revenue. The artists will have to rely on gigs and merchandise to make money and even those will only acquire so much. Without any cash flow, many artists won’t be able to tour across the country and play shows for all their fans across the world, but instead will be limited to places that are financially feasible for them to travel to. While Andrew Maas makes an excellent point about it costing quite a bit of money to keep this from happening, I think that it will be well worth it in the long run because the money the artists will make will surely surpass the sum of that which it will cost to fix the problem.
Overall, illegal downloading can be found everywhere and can be seen as wrong or right. Whether it is music downloads or software downloads, it affects everyone and is causing a large problem in today’s economy.
