Piracy And Affecting Music Industry By Beverly Storrs: Article Analysis

Great Essays
In “Piracy is Stealing and Affecting Music Industry”, Beverly Storrs informs about the outcome of pirating music on the music industry. Using the Webster’s Dictionary definition, Storrs defines what piracy is and then puts it into context for music piracy. Then, the essay begins to explain how people think that it is not that big of a deal to illegally download music but Storrs uses statistics from the Recording Industry Association of America to show otherwise. The Recording Industry Association of America claims that when pirating music, this not only affects the artist but the individuals who work in the music industry as well with 70,000 music industry workers without a job and losing two billion dollars in compensation. The author uses …show more content…
In the 1920s, there was the famous bootlegging of alcohol and later on there were individuals who would attend concerts with a tape recorder and sell them to others who did not attend for profit. However, a new era of bootlegging made its debut. “…since 1998 when Shawn Fanning created Napster…Napster represented the first mainstream and user-friendly program to transfer and download these files. Napster, a peer-to-peer (P2P) program, allowed online users to connect with one another and swap copyrighted music, videos, and other files contained on their computers, thus providing a way to get free music online” (Bender 2009). Unfortunately, because of the rise of Napster this has caused a decrease in music sales. From 2000, Worldwide music sales have plummeted from 27 billion dollars to 15 billion dollars in 2010. In the United States, musical earnings have decreased 46% from 14.6 billion dollars in 1999 to 7.7 billion dollars in 2009 (The Effect of Graduated Response Anti-Piracy Laws on Music Sales: Evidence from an Event Study in France, 2012). When factoring in an artist’s compensation and how much the sales in the music industry have decrease, it is difficult not to see how artists are not negatively affected by …show more content…
Within the past few years, music streaming sites like Pandora, Spotify, and iHeartRadio began to make their way into the digital world. One thing all these applications have in common is that they are free and convenient, a lot like file sharing. Some have argued that since the rise of these sites, piracy is beginning to become obsolete. In “Streaming Reaches Flood Stage: Does Spotify Stimulate or Depress Music Sales?”, the authors state how Spotify has changed the effect of illegal downloading altogether and that every forty-seven streams the file sharing rate goes down by one (Aguiar, Waldfogel, 2015). While this does help the artist in a way Spotify is stingy with how they pay the artist through the streaming service. For every song that is streamed the artists receives $0.007 per stream (Streaming Reaches Flood Stage: Does Spotify Stimulate or Depress Music Sales? 2015). Spotify and other music streaming sites are a great way to put file sharing to a hold but it would help the musicians more if their music was paid

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