Wednesday 7 October 2009

Why Pirate? – Part 1, Music

The issue of digital Piracy has come under increasingly heavy legal fire of late. Peter Mandelson has been making noise, Lily Allen has been embarrassing herself, the entertainment industries in league with the Swedish legal system have concentrated all their firepower on bringing down thepiratebay.org, the French are determined to implement their “three strikes policy” and BT and other UK ISPs are fighting increasing pressure from many sectors to (essentially) police the web.

Piracy is perceived by the industries whose products are pirated as a massively bad thing. They operate under the assumption that every download represents a loss of sale, which is in itself debatable, but not the issue I intend to debate right now. As the title suggests I’m concerned with why people Pirate, is it just to get stuff for free is there more to it?

To gain an insight into the issue lets take a look at what people pirate, below is a picture of the Pirate Bays “Browse Torrents” page:

  

I don’t intend to cover every category listed, but I will cover most of the more “popular” piracy targets and attempt to demonstrate how Pirates provide services that the industries have either inadequately provide or completely failed to.

Music

  • Dishonest Marketing – Choosing music to listen to is difficult. The music industry utilises an antiquated method of marketing in order to influence your choices primarily concerning the promotion of albums through the release and promotion of singles, music videos and press reviews. Prior to the Internet age this was basically as good as it got, but now the Internet is here it’s painfully inadequate. Singles are rarely a fair representative of an albums quality, generally the superior songs from the album are released as singles to promote their parent albums which may consist of pure crap with the exception of said singles – I call this dishonest marketing. Imagine you bought a car purely on how it looked from the outside, but upon attempting to drive it discovered it lacked an engine – that’s kinda how I look at marketing through singles, and yeah, you’d be a dumb fuck to buy a car without test driving it, guess what? You’re a dumb fuck if you buy music without hearing it first, and that’s how the industry treats us, like a big mass of dumb fucks. How about press reviews? Considering the uncertainty over what is genuine and what is bought and paid for can you trust any opinion that is not your own? I’m not suggesting that all music piracy is on a “try before you buy” basis, but it is a “service” provided by piracy that the industry has made little effort to provide itself.
  • Music Discovery Tools - Credit where credit is due though, they do appear to be making somewhat of an effort through the streaming service Spotify. Spotify is a decent effort, but far from perfect, the truth is it doesn’t have nearly the library one can sample via “illegal” channels, a quick search on Spotify for my last three CD purchases (The Wildhearts – Chutzpah!, Pearl Jam – Backspacer, Idlewild – Post Electric Blues) nets me zero hits. I’d also point out that I had a pre-release pirated copy of Post Electric Blues and bought it yesterday, release day. The music industry, particularly in the UK has a long history of shooting itself in the foot with regards to various other streaming services. The industry demands a fee be paid for every song streamed by these services. This fee was deemed so unreasonably high the the Pandora project was forced to pull out of the UK while recently YouTube refused to service the UK with music video streams for an extended period due to the unreasonable fee demands. One should point out that these services (particularly Pandora) are excellent music discovery tools and the potential income from albums sold as a direct result of artist discovery via these services are potentially more valuable than the pittance earned from per-stream fees – but greed is often blind. During the YouTube furore I did think it particularly galling that the music industry expected payment from video streams of content they had uploaded themselves for free and using YouTube’s servers to stream said content at zero expense to themselves. YouTube is a service they choose to use, yet they want paid for it? Madness! YouTube/Google offer all YouTubers the opportunity to monetise their channels via adsense, if the music industry wants to monetise its voluntary uploads to YouTube then it should use the same methods as everyone else.
  • Pre-release Piracy - Albums are typically recorded and completed months before their final release date, pirates typically view this as an unnecessary delay and endeavour to make available albums prior to their release date. The music industry could prevent pre-release piracy on its current scale by releasing completed albums as soon as they are finished. The technology is there, the demand is there, why isn’t the service there? Until such time as it is there, pre-release piracy is likely to continue.
  • FLAC – FLAC is an acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec, it is a form of audio compression which allows a CD to be compressed to a smaller file size without the loss of any data. In stark contrast the “industry standard” for audio compression is mp3, a lossy compression format – the file size is drastically reduced but at the expense of data loss. Additionally mp3 is encumbered by patents which drives up the cost of music released in the format. Most individuals won’t hear the difference between an mp3 encoded at ~192kbs or higher and a FLAC file, either because they lack the ability or because they lack the audio equipment necessary to distinguish between the two (poor speakers or ear/headphones will render the quality difference between the two negligible to all but the most “golden eared”), however there remains a subset of audiophile consumers to whom mp3 is of unacceptable quality. Very few artists, and almost no artists on commercial record labels have their work released legally for purchase in FLAC format. Furthermore, individuals who wish to use a lossy audio codec other than mp3 are not catered for by the industry at present either, and since mp3 cannot be converted to another lossy format without substantial degradation in audio quality choice is limited and some people choose to pirate to have their needs met as the pirate community is willing to provide FLAC files which can be transcoded to the codec of your desire.

As this is shaping up to be somewhat longer than expected I’m breaking it up, next part will cover Video at the least.

freedoms_stain, until next time, out.

No comments: