Summative Blog Post: Internet Music Piracy

Thank you rights to animals for your reply back and interesting comment on my initial blog post about music piracy.  I agree with you on the statement that if music is available to people for free on the internet that why would people spend their money on a CD or an Itunes download.  As a generation who has grown up with technology and new emerging applications like Limewire, Bittorrent, and Napster we don’t even second guess ourselves when we click the download button for songs, movies, and television shows.  We are so accustomed to having everything available for free and at the click of a button for free.  So if it is available to us at no cost why would we change our habits and start paying for music?  This is the number one concern for recording companies and like you mentioned from the year 2000 sales dropped 39% so I can’t even imagine how pirating music is affecting CD sales today.  However we are moving into a new day and age and people no longer want hard copies and we are moving towards having digital copies of everything.  That is where iTunes comes into effect.  iTunes offers its customers digital copies of legally purchased music to upload to their computers.  However at a dollar a song iTunes to most people is only used as a library in which we store our illegally downloaded music.  I think that if iTunes offered a dollar for 10 songs it would be a little but more reasonable or like you said have a program which allows you a certain amount of downloads that are legal and have licenses per month, since we are a generation that is obsessed with listening, sharing and downloading music.  Having an iTunes playlist with over a thousand songs downloaded legally would be a hefty investment that is not practical.

I believe that music piracy will always be a substantial issue for the recording industry.  They are not earning the rightful amount of profits for the amount of people that have their product illegally.  However in order to control this issue there has to be more consequences given to pirates and peer-to-peer sharing sites.  In all honestly I think that people are always going to find a way around legally purchasing music and will constantly look for ways to obtain the music for free.