Musicians and Piracy

Okay stop whining. You are a millionaire musician making ungodly amounts of money compared to my broke 18 year old self. So when you tell me I am wrong for downloading your song of the internet for nothing, then sue the pants off me leaving me with nothing left to my name, all over a 99 cent download. Think again.

South Park, a TV show on Comedy Central hit the nail on the head with this one. The boys get themselves into trouble when they download music off of a free file sharing web site. The cops show up to their doors and take them in. The boys respond saying its not a big deal. One of the cops loses it and takes them on a tour of the “suffering” musicians, who can't make ends meet because of internet piracy. The boys end up at Britney Spears’ house where due to piracy she now has to save up to buy all the lavish things she wants. The boys quickly learn their lesson. The makers of South Park tend to have a message behind all of their episodes.

Can you guess the message?

That is right, piracy is not a big deal, and when rich artists complain about not making enough money we need to stop sympathizing with them.

Jack White has had an extremely successful music career. He has been in three bands, (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather) and had a huge solo career. He is considered an incredible musician and has a sound that is uniquely his. He was quoted saying “I don't mind [piracy] that much, really,” later on he explained how he felt that he only wants to have music in its physical form of records and CD’s and how he felt that when buying music of the internet he doesn't feel like he is buying anything saying “you think that its there, but you can't see any moving parts and that's disappointing.”

Neil Young’s approach to piracy is simple “Piracy is the new radio, that's how music gets around. That's the real world for these kids.” He says how piracy is the new radio and how that's how us kids listen to music, and lets face it most of us kids are broke. So when artists expect us kids to shell out 15 bucks for their newest album we might think twice. But think back to the 60’s when certain music was banned from being played on the radio so what did people do? They set up boats and broadcast songs over the radio that people wanted to hear.

So you might be wondering why do they care so much. Because the HUGE record labels behind them care. They don't want some 30 year old hacker in Sweden uploading all their artists hits because they loose sales. And who pirates the most... Teenagers and College Students. Because we either make little to nothing at our part time jobs or we don't work and our parents give us spending money every couple weeks. Us teenagers also love to rebel and pirating music is one of those easy ways to rebel. Record labels could probably solve all their pirating woes if the latest CD was not $15. Because when you market music to Teens and College Students you need to understand we don't have the same disposable income that our Adult counterparts do.

In Flames Biography

                In Flames is a Swedish band that started as Jesper Strӧmblad's side project from a death metal band by the name of Ceremonial Oath. He began this side project in 1990. Jesper is from Gothenburg, Sweden, and this is where he began the project that would become In Flames. In 1993, Jesper decided to break off from Ceremonial Oath altogether, making In Flames his primary focus. The very first singer for In Flames was Jesper Stromblad. At the time, he was the singer for another melodic death metal band, Dark Tranquility. He provided vocals for In Flames, on their first album, "Lunar Strain" and their EP "Subterranean."  In 1996, when their second studio album, "The Jester Race," was made, Anders Friden replaced him as the singer. The album "The Jester Race" was also the origin of their symbol, the Jesterhead, which has become a widely recognized symbol among fans of the metal genre, as something representing the band In Flames. 

Do the poor not deserve the same music as you?

I believe that "inherent value" is an oxymoron, because, if something has value to you, that means that you value it. Nothing just has objective, natural, and irrefutable value by itself, people find value in it, and what one person values, another person may not. Thusly, in my opinion, all value is subjective. That fact does not, however, make things people find valuable any less valuable to those people. Just because value is personal does not mean it doesn't exist.

Music is like an extremely advanced form of communication. It's as if the artist takes a fragment of how they were feeling in a particular moment, or how they imagine someone else, or even a hypothetical person, was feeling, and puts it into the mind of another person: the listener, allowing them to perceive and experience a moment as the original person who felt that set of emotions did. In this sense, music is a means of communication that accomplishes a form of interpersonal empathy no other means has yet been able to, other than visual art. The fact that we still have it today, after all the ages, makes sense, because one of the largest reasons we evolved to where we are today as humans was by being a social species, i.e, communicating.

The ability to recognize and understand such a message in music has many of the same limits as other means of communication. One good example is the ability to comprehend a language; if you were trying to tell something, no matter how much meaning it had to you, to someone else, but you were saying it in Mandarin Chinese, and this person didn't speak Mandarin Chinese, it would seem like meaningless nothingness to them. The message would only be received by those with the wherewithal to do so, i.e. "speaking the language" of that music.

Whether or not all music should be paid for by its listeners is an entirely different question. When it comes to this matter, I support the decision, largely, being up to each individual artist. It is definitely hard to protect each individual song or track down each illegal download or streaming of music, which could make the following method complicated to execute, but I think that, if a specific artist is ok with his or her music being shared freely, then this decision should be respected, and if an artist wants the purchase of their music to be protected, then it should be protected, as such. There are many examples of artists from the sixties that had a very relaxed approach to the sharing of their music, and, in many cases, encouraged it, because what mattered to them was getting the meaning, message, and feeling of their music spread around, for all the world to hear, the way that works of art of the ancient masters are appreciated by everyone today, and not how much they profited from it.

It is, of course, true that this is not exactly the trend today, and although this may largely be attributed to the advent of the internet and subsequent ease of piracy, I still think it's fair to question what the grander implications of this are. Do modern musicians largely care more about how much money they're making for their next song than whether or not it reaches someone, means something to them, or helps them? This was absolutely not the case for the aforementioned artists from the sixties. Is this due to the advent of the internet, or is there a bigger issue going on here? There are actually a few examples of artists with more relaxed views about how their music is spread today. Although their motivations for this attitude vary from being a band still in the early stages of its development in desperate need of publicity to more philosophical thoughts, these bands do exist. One such band is System of a Down, or at the very least, they were one such band back in their third album. This is the cover of that album: