It has been twelve years since Napster burst onto the music scene in 1999, radically changing the industry and the way that music is obtained. All of a sudden, going to the record store and buying a physical CD was unnecessary. From the comfort of your home computer, all you had to do was search for the music you wanted, and download it with a simple click of the mouse. The legal and moral ramifications of this activity were secondary to the ease of use and availability of free music.
Twelve years later, the music industry is irrevocably changed as a result. Once upon a time, music enthusiasts enjoyed browsing at record stores, discovering new music and buying albums. Now, in the age of iTunes, people can download songs individually, and the “I’ll try it” culture of picking up new albums at the store has gone by the wayside. People can listen to virtually anything they wish on YouTube or Pandora, and can easily download through various “torrent” websites. Though there have been numerous lawsuits and attempts at increasing legal downloading via iTunes, Amazon, and other legal websites, it is clear that illegal downloading has been taking its toll on record sales.
I talked to a music industry insider to get some insight into this phenomenon. Shane Told is the lead singer for the band Silverstein, a popular screamo-punk band that has been together and touring since 2000. In addition, he runs his own record label, Verona Records. He has seen firsthand the significant changes in the industry over the past decade.
“There are kids out there that have never paid for music,” Shane says, citing the advent of Napster as the beginning of the end for the music industry.
When I ask Shane how this has affected sales of his own music, he shared some album sales statistics. “Between 2003 and 2007, Silverstein sold approximately 650,000 albums. Between 2008 and 2010, our sales were closer to 150,000 albums. It’s not just us, that’s the way it’s been across the industry”.
The New York Times article, "Billboard Chart Sinks to Another Low", from January 20, 2011, backs up Shane’s view. “Taylor Swift's ''Speak Now'' (Big Machine) landed at No. 1 with 52,000 copies sold, the fewest Billboard has recorded for an album in the top slot since 1991, when it began using certified sales records from SoundScan.”
This phenomenon appears to be global. The UK newspaper The Guardian published an article on February 20, 2011, "Music is thriving, but the business is dying. Who can make it pay again?" . This article echoes Shane Told’s sentiments regarding the music industry woes, and points out that the artists who consistently perform well in physical sales, as opposed to downloads, are those whose fans are not as comfortable using the digital platform. The article states, “Take That, with Robbie Williams, may be one of the very few bands that can still sell large quantities of CDs – not least because as their record company, Universal Music, found, their mainly lower-income, older female fan base prefers not to download songs online.”
The fact is, there are fewer and fewer music fans willing to pay for a physical CD these days. More worrisome to the industry is that fewer are willing to pay for music at all.
“It’s not just musicians that are affected. It’s everyone in the music industry,” Shane Told explains. “Labels have had to lay off workers, record producers are making less money, so the deals bands sign give more rights to the record labels and make it harder for musicians to make a living. On top of that, labels are spending less money on promotion, meaning we sell even fewer albums, so it becomes a downward spiral,” Shane explains.
Legal downloading accounts for 46% of sales in the US, according to Nielsen SoundScan and reported in the New York Times article. “Last year nearly 1.2 billion individual tracks were sold, an increase of only 1 percent from 2009; the previous year digital track sales rose 8 percent, and the year before that 27 percent.”
The New York Times calls this small 1% increase a “sales plateau”, but I can’t help but wonder if this is an indicator that more people are becoming tech savvy and downloading digital files illegally rather than paying for them.
This trend towards downloading, both legal and illegal, illustrates the need for increased awareness of the importance of understanding both what is being downloaded, and the ramifications of piracy. I was pleased to read Standard 8 of the AASL Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning, a link to which is found on our Moodle. This standard stresses the importance of today’s learner respecting the rights of producers of intellectual property.
As illegal downloading becomes more and more accessible, it is clear that moral and ethical understanding, and a solid sense of social responsibility are needed to help young people to decide what to do when faced with the choice of how to obtain their music. Hopefully, schools and libraries can step up with comprehensive media literacy education to provide them with the tools they need to be competent and responsible consumers of music and other copyrighted media.
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