Following up on Sir Mick Jagger’s musings below, here’s a point -counterpoint on the digital piracy issue.
Representing the Internet-is-destroying-music argument, we have Megan McCardle. She’s free market gal, but in her current Atlantic Monthly piece “The Freeloaders” she wonders if this current industry crisis is a real turning point. Here’s the intro, click the link above to get the rest (For free! Awesome!):
It’s official: 2009 was the worst year for the record labels in a decade. So was 2008, and before that 2007 and 2006. In fact, industry revenues have been declining for the past 10 years. Digital sales are growing, but not as fast as traditional sales are falling.Maybe that’s because illegal downloads are so easy. People have been pirating intellectual property for centuries, but it used to be a time-consuming way to generate markedly inferior copies. These days, high-quality copies are effortless. According to the Pew Internet project, people use file-sharing software more often than they do iTunes and other legal shops.
I’d like to believe, as many of my friends seem to, that this practice won’t do much harm. But even as I’ve heard over the past decade that things weren’t that bad, that the music industry was moving to a new, better business model, each year’s numbers have been worse. Maybe it’s time to admit that we may never find a way to reconcile consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid.