Home of the jester in the court of the ragtag soldiers.
Oh, That Bad Boy Bono
Some people have all the nerve.
This past weekend, U2’s lead singer penned an op-ed for the New York Times covering an assortment of topics. Ten, in fact. One of them was file sharing. Which, for the record, has nothing to do with passing around the emery board at a sleepover. He said:
Caution! The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files. The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.
A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.
We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product. Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit, or famous actors; find the next Cole Porter, if he/she hasn’t already left to write jingles.
As one can imagine, the BitTorrent brigade has been howling ever since. Spoiled rich rock star. We’re not stealing. We’re standing up to The Man. Power to the people. More Ovaltine, please. (Okay, I threw that last one in to see if you’re paying attention.)
In other words, they’ve reacted without reading.
As Bono makes clear, the big boys and girls don’t notice the lost revenue all that much. It’s the Chris Ryans of this world, the ones trying to make it as artists, who get hurt the most by file sharing both directly and indirectly. Directly, every copy of their music downloaded illegally is that much less money in their pocket. A very shallow pocket. Indirectly, as the revenue stream for record companies shrink, they become less interested in taking a chance on any new artist that doesn’t come across as immediate pop fan fodder. Thus, anything outside the ultra-commercial norm gets put to the side. Anything… and anyone.
Believe me, I’m no music industry lover. Exact opposite. However, like any other business it deserves what it earns. Taking content without compensation is inexcusable. It hurts all parties involved, not just the soulless corporation. It’s asking people to work for free, people who spend a lot of money, time and effort on their work in hope of earning a living from their art. If you see no problem with that, make sure you volunteer your services at work whenever someone wishes for it to be that way. Assuming you have a job or are actively trying to get one, that is.
So yeah, rail against Bono all you want. He’s telling the truth. Don’t like it? Too bad.
P.S. Before anyone jumps on the “who are you to talk — you’re using copyrighted material in this post” bandwagon, yes I am. The differences between this and file sharing? One, I give credit, including a link back, to the source. Two, the content is available for free from the originator, therefore no revenue is lost when you click over to read the entire article, thus seeing the ads on the Times’ site. So save the faux outrage.
P.S. Here’s some Chris Ryan for you:
Comments are closed.
January 6, 2010 - 7:46 AM
Hey! Nice to see you touting Chris Ryan. He played our Songwriters’ Showcase a while back. Greatly talented, per his gene pool. And Bono is spot on about the issue.
January 6, 2010 - 9:11 AM
“every copy of their music downloaded illegally is that much less money in their pocket”
I kind of have to take issue with this, because there is some research to contradict this. Of course, it is true that every copy downloaded illegally is still stealing, no matter how you look at it. But it does not necessarily mean that the person downloading the illegal copy was going to buy a copy in the first place. They only lose money if the person was going to buy the disc in the first place and then didn’t.
I say this because there is research that has found that people that do the most illegal downloading also purchase the most legal music. They are actually downloading the music they would have never bought to see if they like it. Which I am not saying is legal, but it is what they are doing. And they end up liking an album they weren’t going to buy, and they go buy it.
You see, there are also artists that have intentionally leaked albums early, and then found that sales actually increased after that.
The problem is that “anything outside the ultra-commercial norm gets put to the side” has always been the case, before mp3s, before CDs even. I remember all of the “home taping is killing the music industry” stickers that used to be out there.
The problem is, Bono and others are right that this is stealing, but the research and numbers out there aren’t necessarily pointing at illegal file sharing being the culprit for why sales are going down.
For one, no one has taken is to account the fact that eBay and Amazon and CD Warehouse all rose to prominence at the same time new CD sales were going down. Why buy a new CD, when i can get it use on Amazon for $3 in a few weeks? That also hurts lesser known artists – less copies are availalble, meaning the price for used copies stays higher.
And what about MySpace? It also exploded at the same time CD sales shrunk. What if people (like me) are just listening to songs posted there and deciding they don’t really like what they are hearing beyond the one buzz song?
No one is taking all of these factors into consideration. I am convinced that we can find a way to shut down illegal file sharing tomorrow, and CD sales will still not re-bound. It is just oo multi-faceted.
For one thing, record companies are naive enough to count every 10 downloads as 1 “album sale.” Sorry, many people are actually just buying the one song they like off the album that they like, which legal mp3s allow now. It is more like 1 download = 1 whole album sale lost. Companies have banked on people buying a whole album just to get one song for so long, they don’t know what to so with singles anymore. And they won’t change their business model to match the new reality.