Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

I'm a musician and home recording studio owner and I usually lurk a bit on the recording user groups to pick up some tips and offer some sage advice. A discussion I came across today involved an individual who downloads "cracked" versions of recording software and makes copies for his friends. These software packages are fairly expensive but they have the capabilities to literally turn a spare room into a professional recording studio and it takes many hours of development by quite a number of people to produce them. The audacity of someone to take someone's hard work and diminish it like that is absolutely unconscionable. If anyone should appreciate the consequences of piracy, it certainly ought to be musicians. Movie, software and music piracy takes food out of the mouths not only the designers, artists, producers, movie studios and record companies but all the people involved in the production of the particular media. And as usual, as things tighten up, the people at the bottom of the pay scale suffer the most.

I've always wanted to be able to explain this to people who think that only the artists and the media companies are the only one affected by piracy. Hopefully, this will strike home. Let's set the stage by assuming you've spent you're life learning to become a master bakery chef. The culmination of your career is opening your own bakery with the finest pastries that only you have the recipe for. People flock to your store every day to buy the things only your bakery makes. Things couldn't be any better. New big house, great cars, only the best schools for your children and lavish gifts for your wife. Then, all of sudden your business starts to fall off and you can't understand why. Your regulars aren't coming in anymore to get their favorite pastries and breads. The banker is calling about your mortgage payments and your children have to wear hand-me downs and thrift store bargains to public school. Your wife has to sell back her jewelry you worked so hard for and you're having to lay off people. After a bit of investigation, you find out some interloper has been taking your free samples, running them through his recipe analyzer and giving the recipes out to his friends. The very things you've put your soul, heart and life into have been reduced to just a copy of a recipe. That's what piracy does - it reduces the hard work of people who trained themselves for years to learn their craft to cheap copies.


I do understand that some bands want their fans to download their songs and I don't have a problem with that because they chose to do that. It gets their music out there and helps bring fans to their shows. The prevailing rational is that if people download the music off the internet, they'll want to buy the CD because the audio quality is better. The problem with that is a lot of people who download are not audiophiles. They're completely happy with the lower audio quality. There's no way an Ipod is going to sound like a CD played through a proper home or car stereo, regardless of how good your headphones are. One of the reasons popular music has become so formulaic is that the record companies need every song to pay off because their profit margins have been squeezed. There's very little room for letting an artist develop.


Music is just the tip of the iceberg. Downloading movies from the internet is even more of a travesty. Every person credited at the end of a film is making their living by working in the motion picture industry. I don't think this is going to be the end of movies but I do feel it will force the industry to find cheaper ways to do things which means the people at the bottom of the food chain will have to find something else to do and the ones left with jobs will have to do more without any more compensation. Movies are going down the same road popular music has. So many of the motion pictures coming out now follow a proven formula for fiscal success but don't challenge viewers the way films used to. Even if the movie blazes a new trail artistically, the studios have to package so that people will think it's just like all the other run of the mill films being churned out by Hollywood.