Rock stars might have to get a day job with rising costs of downloading or buying music ,people illegally downloading music have become incredibly common .An increasing number of websites are available for pirating like person to person file sharers or YouTube to mp3 converters.
These sites are not a recent phenomenon. Person to person file sharers have been around since the early 1990’s, one of the first and most famous being the now defunct Napster. These sites are loved by people who use them to their advantage bypassing of paying $1.29 on iTunes per song but hated by artists who lose.
Metallica hates music pirates Napstar so much they fought back with an album called Download This which was a song that was 55 minutes long called “Napster Be Gone” and a 20 minute interview on why downloading music without paying for it was unfair to the artists. The length of this song made it so no one would download or be able to download due to its size. Napster now requires people to pay for the music.
Although not all artist hate the idea of free music many upcoming artist release their music for free to allow them to be found and many others just put out a few free songs thinking that if people like them they will buy more of that respective artist music.
Whether or not the artist themselves think that people downloading there music off the internet for free is wrong , immoral, or stealing it hasn’t stopped people or slowed the increase of people illegally downloading music.
In an online survey started by the IFPI only 50% of all people who participated claimed they download music for free because it is free. Many other people said they did it as a try before you buy. Sophomore Elspeth Barnhart said she does it “Because it’s free and I don’t have the money to buy it”. Senior Emily Wills does it because she lost her iTunes library when her computer crashed and she said “I already paid for the song once why should I have to again?”
The RIAA says that there are $12.5 billion in economics losses in the music industry due to pirating, the average iPod contains $800 of pirated music, and that 95% of music downloaded online is illegal. The most troubling statistic for people in the music industry is that 70% of people find nothing wrong in online piracy.
Adults are just as guilty as teens, often showing their children how to find the means to download music for free.
Pirating music has become an endemic spreading worldwide. The music industry loses billions of dollars to pirating every year. That amount is only increasing as time goes on, due to an increase in the amount of people illegally downloading music. With 70% of the population finding nothing wrong in online piracy one can only wonder what will happen to the music industry in years to come.
