Piracy has plagued the music industry since its inception. In the context of copyright infringement, the term ‘pirate’ is more than 300 years old.
Yet as U.S author Stephen Witt makes clear in his book HOW MUSIC GOT FREE, the perfect storm of technological innovation that took place beginning in the mid nineties with the birth of the internet and later the mind-boggling advances in digital music compression methods along with the enabling of file-sharing and streaming, allowed for the plundering of an entire industry on an industrial scale never imagined as being possible before, by a generation of entitled teenagers and twenty-somethings that truly believed the idea of compensating artists for the music they created was unnecessary and the whole notion of copyright was an outdated legal concept from the 18th century.
Witt recounts how when Sony had its Walkman craze back in the 1980’s, the music industry sold tens of millions of tapes. Alongside the Discman craze that followed, the music industry also sold ten’s of millions of CD’s. So, doing the maths, the success of the MP3 player beginning from the late nineties should have also meant tens – no hundreds – of millions in sales of legally purchased MP3 songs and albums. The great problem was it never did, principally because there existed (and still exist) multitudinous ways to illegally download the same items at no cost. Ten million iPods sold in stores should have meant ten billion songs sold through iTunes. Again, never happened. Legal digital downloads have grown since those first ‘free-for-all’ days of the late 90’s all-out attack on intellectual property rights and copyright, but nothing like what was needed to compensate the record companies amidst the death rattle of the compact disc which we have all been witnessing for the last few years.
At the heart of HOW MUSIC GOT FREE lies a bigger issue that reaches far beyond the boundaries of the music industry. It is the idea that the internet can and perhaps should function as a store of all human knowledge and experience that can be accessed by anyone for free, leading to a thriving public domain and rapidly increased rates of innovation for which all humankind is the beneficiary.
Seen this ‘bigger picture’ way, one can more readily accept the notion that in the quest for the development of knowledge and ideas for the greater good of society in general, individual industries may need to be sacrificed in order that others thrive. To this end, whether one sees the forced ‘liberation’ of the recording industry as the work of idealistic revolutionaries or racketeering criminals is entirely a matter of point of view.
In the meantime, Stephen Witt has written a forensically researched book that lays bare in compelling year by year detail what may be regarded as one of the greatest criminal conspiracies in the history of forever to subvert copyright and in the process bring down an industry.
Want more? I give you more.
Ps. Your first bonus read this week is a short story called COLD CALLING. Word of advice – you might want to have a stiff lemonade on hand for afterwards.
Pss. Your bonus bonus read this week is an article from THE GUARDIAN about the theft of 160 very rare and old books from an East London warehouse earlier this year. The crime to date remains unsolved. Thieves broke in through a roof skylight and avoided a security alarm system to make off with books dating back to the 15th century. Books stolen include original works from Leonardo DaVinci, Galileo and Isaac Newton.