The Effects of Piracy on Artists?
Exploring music piracy: ways, consequences, impact on industry & artists.

As time progresses, many ways to consume media keep arising, increasing accessibility for target audiences. In those ways, we may find traditional methods like Radio or Vinyl, and newer apps like YouTube Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and more.

Although these new methods may be free to use initially, they have ad-revenue financing plans for musicians, meaning that they pay the people who upload their music to their platform by forcing ads in between songs, right before or after a song.

If you watch a music video, it’s even worse as an ad can appear mid-video catching you off-guard.

This, alongside features limited to premium users of these platforms, like unlimited skips for Spotify, or ad-free streaming on YouTube, start eventually pushing listeners to either purchase the premium subscriptions to keep enjoying their quality time, or to stop using these services to listen to music, and instead rely on pirating, and listening to it on the easier-to-configure, offline-accessible, and usually ad-free MP3 media players. This, of course, has many effects on the artists, as well as the consumers themselves.

In this article, we’ll work through the different ways pirating music can happen, and the different consequences it could lead to, and how it eventually affects the many factors of the music industry and the artists.

Piracy

Online Piracy can be compared to the traditional piracy, where a pirate ship attacks another ship, robbing its loot, for it to later to be distributed to a crew or used by the pirate for their own goals.

In the case of music, or art in general, the pirate is the person downloading copyrighted music or art without having to pay the artist for the permission to distribute or use the piece, in order to publish it on a site of their own, or for personal use. As said by Apple founder Steve Jobs, “It is piracy, not overt online music stores, that is our main competitor.”

As long as a person has to purchase a piece of music, it means the artists are getting paid, one way or another. In apps like YouTube, we pay for music by seeing ads, and by giving the videos a legitimate tracking method, which is views. In online stores, we pay for a subscription, or for the music itself, and part of that payment goes to the artists through licensing and copyright. So as Steve Jobs said, online music stores would be typically legal and therefore wouldn’t be considered as threatening competition in the music industry.

In general, Online Piracy is also illegal and punishable by law in most countries. We can take the example of the United States, where distributing unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings can be punished for thousands of dollars. As a matter of fact, the fines could go up to 150 000$ per pirated song.

However, digital piracy is still easily accessible by individuals to a degree, and most of the times, the piracy goes entirely unnoticed by authorities, leading to less people being scared of the law, and eventually more people being inclined to pirate songs.

The biggest help piracy got in this day in age was he internet, because of the internet, being a pirate is so easy it only takes 2 minutes do download a song illegally whether by using a torrent site or using an application on your phone like NewPipe, or searching “YouTube video downloader”.

As for what happens after, the artists and the music industry suffer the consequences, which will be explained shortly.

Consequences: Artists

Digital Piracy has many consequences, but not all of these are related to law and legitimacy. Pirating music can actually harm artists in more forms than just the superficial aspect, which is money.

Starting there, Online music piracy leads to yearly losses of billions of dollars in the music industry, impacting music labels and artists all the same in a financial perspective. That being said, it’s easy to imagine an indie artist failing to sustain a career because of the low return of income from their music.

Under that same light, a music label whose artists are deeply affected by music piracy might find it harder to renew or sign new contracts. Also, artists need copyright income to upgrade their equipment, expand their range of work, and improve the quality of music in general.

Because of all this piracy happening so frequently, artists more than usual lose motivation to continue music as their career path as it is proving to be difficult. In addition, since charts and views will be heavily affected by pirating songs, artists will seem way less famous than they actually are. For example, we can say that a song that got on the n2 in the official charts would actually be n1 if all the listens were genuine and legitimate. This can affect an artist heavily since awards would be on the line as well as their pride, money, and they recognition.

Moreover, not only do artists suffer because of that, music labels and the charts take a huge hit in their pockets and they ability to create results.

Consequences: Music industry

As mentioned earlier, the music industry is also affected by music piracy in ways that are not necessarily related to money. For example, a label won’t get its respect if it has small artists compared to other labels. Even though their artists may be huge, if their popularity is born from piracy, it’s usually not taken into account.

In the other more hard-hitting case is of course the money. Labels and artists and the industry in general usually lose a lot of their money because of pirates and a lot of them can’t continue because they don’t have enough funding from the consumers.

On another side, there are the people who make album and song charts on the internet or officially like the billboard top 100 or the UK official charts, where they are getting more inaccurate by the day with the popularity of the music they present since most of the listens on songs are illegitimate.

This can cause many problems in the industry as less cash flow means less opportunities for artists and labels to shine as well as less trust in the hard-working employees who try to research on the music and end up being inaccurate because of the ever-increasing piracy losing the trust of the public.

Conclusion

To conclude this article, piracy is a huge issue that concerns everyone from the people who are pirating to the artists and the industry.

It takes away from the artist’s money, as well as the industry’s. It also takes away recognition, fame, views and a bit of the importance of the artist away from the public and from fellow artists.

And finally, charts are also heavily affected as pirated streams and listens are never counted in the charts as they cannot be tracked.

The biggest help piracy got by far was the internet making it the problem that it is now.

Piracy is a big issue but I believe it would be fixed if there was a fully free streaming service without constant ads swarming the music.

Sources:

https://www.riaa.com/resources-learning/about-piracy/

https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-23-4-b-digital-piracy-in-the-21st-century

https://moonjelly.agency/the-effects-of-music-piracy-on-producers/

https://sonosuite.com/en/blog/music-piracy-the-impact-of-stream-ripping-services/