Luis+G’s+2016+OpEd+Article



Music is expensive. Artists spend a great deal of time producing track or albums that top radio charts, either to keep the fans wanting more or to make a living (all valid reasons on why the music is so damn expensive), yet every day someone from anywhere in the world downloads that hot track everyone hears on the radio. So now the artist doesn't get paid right? Lol, Nope. Its really the music industry that doesn't get paid. The music industry basically signs the contracts and licenses to the music, so their job is to get the artist's music out go the public, and they get a huge percentage of the money earned from the total revenue. For example, lets assume Skrillex, Diplo, and Justin Bieber sold around over 2,000,000 copies of "Where are Ü Now". Of the total money collected the artists would only receive around 40% of the total revenue, so they would get 50 cents for every copy of a single track on a store like ITunes. This idea of hurting the music industry and not the artists has justified the billions of pirated music downloads over the years. My problem with all of this? Downloading music for free off of torrents or copying your friends usb drive full of music, or simply downloading the music files off of websites like soundcloud or youtube through apps is NOT killing off music and it does NOT hurt the artist. There is a reason people pirate music, and that's to do things like remix a song, play a dj gig, or take your stuff to a beach party where there is no cell signal. The idea of pirating music is to share. Morally is it right? You tell me. The websites typically find a license of some sort to keep the music available online to share, otherwise countless of web pages would be removed by record labels that are constantly hunting down people that "illegally" use music. (Because putting music in a dj mix online or putting any snippet of audio on youtube without stating what song you used and some authorization to use it apparently counts as an illegal copyright problem). Music downloading is slowly disappearing from the daily lives of consumers thanks to streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and all the ubiquitous radio stations that broadcast worldwide. The fact that there are still people that download the music for free is for creative purposes or to hear better sound quality on songs. What? You didn't know that Spotify and other radios vary in sound quality? Well it does, and frankly I'd rather download a free copy of a song at 320kbps off of a torrent than pay $1.29 on iTunes for the same thing. Plus, having more music to blast out loud and share with friends and family is what gets artist known in the first place. This was why people used to Google lyrics to songs they didn't know, because they heard new music from friends that was either played frequently on the radio or is completely new to them. This was the start of Radio Recommendations from Djs and Musicians that would curated selected music they heard. the only difference here is that they paid money to do it, when you could've done it yourself with a little surf session on the web. In the end the artist gets heard, and that motivates fans to go see them perform. In reality, performances is what gives the artist his full paycheck. This is why Kanye West has no money (rarely performs, his music sucks). This is also why top Dj's like Calvin Harris, have money (has countless dj gigs, gives the people what they want to hear). So if the music industry wants to complain and make me pay for the music, ill go back to copying vinyls or recording the radio. Music deserves to be heard by everyone, not just the wealthy. That doesn't mean I should resort listening to popular radio for my music, but it does mean that we should be entitled to download music for free without having to subscribe to some radio service with countless of ads or monthly fees. I'll start paying when they give artists a fair share of their money (which might be soon thanks to efforts by artists like Taylor Swift, stepping up against the music industry's splitting of profits when it comes to streaming and purchasing of music subscriptions allowing for rookie artists to get paid). I'm gonna go download some more music to share with my friends now.