Piracy and the music industry

How Piracy started

Napster

• First major file sharing program
• Established in 1999
• It pioneered the free 'sharing' of music tracks around the world 
• Napster once had over 25 million users and 80 million songs
• Some high profile music artists started filing law suits for copyrighted music
• In July 2001 Napster was shut down 
• Received a law suit by The Recording Industry Association of America
• September 2001, payed music creators and copyright owners $26 million
• Then declares bankruptcy

How people pirate music today

YouTube converters

• One of the most prominent ways people now pirate music
•  You paste the URL of a YouTube video into the website, choose the format, (MP3 or MP4) then downloaded onto your computer
• Many sites for doing this
• A lot get taken down by they're quickly replaced with others

Impact on the music industry

• Negative impact on the industry. 
• People aren't paying for the music, and takes money from the artist
• Piracy has cost the music industry $12.5 billion in economic losses
• Results in less money in the music industry
• Could result in less music being made, (as they don't have the money to make what they want)
• To combat the decrease in profits the music industry has started firing employees
  
• But others think that the pirating of music is helping 
• Could be beneficial as people who have downloaded songs, may want the artist's merchandise
• Illegal music consumption could stimulate legal music consumption (in theory) 
• File sharing can allow consumers to sample songs/albums which can inform them on what to buy
• The sampling of a song may stimulate individual demand for other songs by the same artist

Combating piracy

• Not too much can really be done to stop piracy
• A lot of lawsuits don't follow through 
• New sites are created everyday for people to pirate stuff off (music, software, etc)
• 2007, Prince launched a legal action against the Pirate Bay. The case was never followed through
• 2014 Prince decided to take legal action against 22 of his fans who posted copies of his live performances online.
• Ed O'Brien (Radiohead) has said he doesn't think pirating is ruining the music industry. "They might not buy an album, but they're spending their money buying concert tickets, a T-shirt, whatever."
• 2007 Radiohead released their 7th album online for free

Google Play Music

How we consumed music, pre-internet

Mike Wesch: Anthropological Introduction to YouTube

Present Facebook information

How I consume music

• YouTube - I mostly go on YouTube for music, and I will either search for songs in particular or I will look in the suggestion box for anything that I might like which is similar to stuff I've listened to before.

• Sometimes I'll see a video on Facebook and I'll search for that song.

• To download sons I use a YouTube converter, but a lot of the ones I use have been taken down, so I haven't downloaded anything for a while.

• For transferring music or media files between my laptop and phone I use a program called media go, which works offline and online

• I then also have a streaming service called google play music, but I don't actually use it for streaming and just use it to store my songs.

• I don't use any app for actual streaming like Spotify or Deezer.

The long tail effect

Most Streamed Artist of 2015: Drake

• Drake is the world’s most streamed artist of 2015
• over 1.8 billion streams this year 
•  46 million listeners

He has been signed to OVO Sound, Cash Money,Young Money, Republic Aspire, and Universal Motown. OVO, was owned by Warner bros. Records, and Cash Money, was owned by Universal Music Group, which are big media conglomerates.

It was recently announced that he is going to sign with BBK, which was founded by Skepta & JME, but it doesn't have a conglomerate parent company, or any other afflicted company's.

On Spotify in the UK the genres to have a consistent amount of listeners in April 2015 were:

1. British Alternative Rock
2. Metal
3. Scottish Rock
4. Punk
5. Pop
6. Welsh Rock
7. UK Hip Hop
8. British Folk
9. Leeds Indie
10. British Indie Rock

impact of internet on media consumption

Artists which have used soundcloud to further their music.

Top 10 soundcloud accounts:
1. Drake (1.5M Followers)
2. Major Lazer (3.7M Followers) 
3. G-Eazy (554K Followers) 
4. Future (8.4M Followers) 
5. Kygo (3.7M Followers)
6. PARTYNEXTDOOR (801K Followers)
7. Chris Brown (5.3M Followers)
8. Kid Ink (239K Followers)
9. The Weeknd (5M Followers)
10. Chance The Rapper (637K Followers)

Though it has a lot of famous artists, there are a couple of lesser known people with a large following. This can show that soundcloud allows for new artists to get as much publicity/viewings as some of the bigger artists.

Application of Mihalidius' theory, media literacy+emerging citizen

Meningitis b vaccine from amber360

Opposition/Counters Slacktivism (Slacker + Activism), end of 20th century, the term has been coined by Dwight Ozard and Fred Clark in 1995 at the Cornerstone Festival. Slacktivism can be defined as the act of showing support for a cause but only truly being beneficial to the egos of people participating in this so-called activism. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism Actions performed via the Internet in support of a political or social cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement, e.g. signing an online petition or joining a campaign group on a social media website or application http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/slacktivism • Examples of front stage behaviour • That we are doing this to show what good people we are, but we’re really being shallow. • Petitioning is better as you are actually doing something to help • Little personal gain • Gets people to talk about it • Not actively engaging in street protests • not all causes may be solved by slacktivism, or even traditional activism

Social networking, Goffman&Giddins

How I use facebook from amber360