An Open Letter: Stopping Music Piracy

The biggest reason given for the decline of album sales and record companies can be summed up in one small, but scary word, “piracy”. I’m pretty sure I’m not smarter than most of the people in charge of spoon feeding the masses their music, but I do have some thoughts on curbing piracy to the point of it becoming an afterthought rather than the leading argument. Keep in mind this solution is not an ‘eat to lose weight’ type of solution only mentioned to grab headlines, but rather an idea which, once put in place, could have an impact in a real and tangible way.

I’ve never written an open letter to anyone before, let alone to multi-million dollar companies. So, if this looks like I’m winging it, then I probably am. Just so everyone is on the same page, we’ll start back close to the beginning. The creation and widespread access to the internet has been a blessing in many ways for the music industry providing cheap distribution in an easily reproducible digital format. However, that double-edged sword has also cut the other way letting people steal, in this case, music. Stealing of music has become so easy and second nature that there are a good amount of people who have written it off as common as merely picking a flower from a neighbor’s yard.

While there is actually no one solution, I think the biggest problem that needs to be addressed is the gap in time from a finished album to its actual release date. Sounds simple I know. Before, iTunes and digital distribution in general time was needed to press the CDs, or even earlier, to copy the tapes, but that step in the process is slowly becoming eliminated. Let’s take a step back for a second so I can explain what I mean because, even though it couldn’t be more obvious, it probably still isn’t clicking for some people. The people who leak music and who are the first ones to get it are the die hard fans. These people are not trying to hurt the bands and musicians in any way they are simply trying to get the music as soon as possible because they love it so much. The key then for the labels is to make the music available to be sold online as soon as possible because if you can sell the album before it leaks, most people will buy it. The biggest reason people pirate the music as soon as it’s leaked is because they can’t buy it; it hasn’t been made available to purchase yet.

I bet you’re thinking of arguments against why this wouldn’t work, aren’t you? First one, marketing. People won’t know about the record yet, and it won’t sell much in its first week. First of all, that’s wrong. Fans of bands know when new music is released because of Myspace, Twitter, blogs, and even sometimes the radio. These are the people you are catering to in the first place by making it available as soon as possible. These people need very little advertising, so stop spending it on them. Second of all, you have to stop thinking that the first week of sales means anything at all. Why can’t something that is, arguably, free to copy over and over sell more and more each week as people find out about it? There can still be an actual CD released two months later or however long it takes for the marketing department to convince people they need the newest Hannah Montana CD, or whatever. I’m not suggesting CDs or physical media stop being made I’m just suggesting that you take advantage of the cheap and easy distribution model in an appropriate way to capture a band’s core audience.

Any more arguments against this stupid theory to stop music piracy? People will still pirate music no matter what. I agree, people will still download music illegally because just like 1+1 will always equal 2, somethings will never change. The key with this, or any, solution is not to eradicate music piracy but to curb it to the point of an afterthought rather than a leading argument for “why the internet sucks”. The argument that people who steal music wouldn’t have bought it anyway is a dicey one to make but with the model of selling an album digitally months before its physical release then that argument becomes pretty close to being correct. Someone who downloads a CD 2 years after it was released probably wasn’t going to buy it in the first place but they may become a fan and buy the next one.

I’ll give you a simple example of how this would look in a real life situation. A band goes into the studio for 3 weeks and records their second album which has been building hype with the band talking about the new songs on Twitter whenever they get the chance. The band finishes and the tracks get mixed and shortly after get sent to be mastered. While all this is happening, artwork and all the design work is happening so that when it’s done being mastered you can have the album put up and, possibly, featured on iTunes.

The crossroads which the music industry as a whole is at currently will either be changed by you, the labels, or by some kind of other market force which doesn’t care that you need to make money.

-Tyler

P.S. Music reviews much like the ones on The Album Project do have the chance to get hurt with everyone getting the music at the same time but I’m optimistic that everyone still wants to find out what someone else thinks of an album before they decide to plop down cash for it. Even if they do go against a reviewers recommendation.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.