Music Piracy and Illegal Music Downloading

Photo by Kameron Kincade on Unsplash

For those of you who know me personally, you know that I am currently in graduate school. In my class this week one of my classmates gave a presentation about the effect of social media in the music business, in which he advocated stealing music and other media. While I don’t personally agree with this, his argument for why his activities were justifiable concerns me because I think many people believe the same thing. 

Artists Don’t Need My Money...They’re Famous

While every artist or band’s contract is different, every penny of a song, ticket, or album purchase is being divided up between every person who has worked to bring you the album or show. All the money earned for a show has to be divided to cover travel costs, food, roadies, venue rental, t-shirts and other merchandise, promoters, managers, hotels, and everything else that’s associated with being on the road. Even though a tour may gross a million dollars, after all the expenses that are involved the individual band members are looking at a small fraction of that.

In terms of song and album purchases, the $1.29 or $.99 you spend on a song gets split between the songwriter, producer, engineers, performers, and anyone else that is contractually obligated to the money raised through this manner. In the case of pop stars they only see about 5% of that money...of course the actual percentage depends on the contract.

The point of this is that album, songs, merchandise, and ticket sales are all a volume game. Piracy cuts a significant portion of the potential buyers of musical goods. I’m not saying that Justin Timberlake or Metallica needs more money, they already have a stronghold on their markets, but the producers, engineers, and the people that you have never heard of that are involved are loosing their jobs.

Piracy isn’t going away, but it becomes more important to do other things in support of the groups you enjoy listening to. If you don’t then the groups will slowly fade away because no one will be able to afford to bring you the music you enjoy. It becomes a moral and ethical decision that you’ll have to decide on your own. Just realize that peoples’ jobs and well beings depend on how you choose to support intellectual endeavors both nationally and locally.