How have the effects of file sharing impacted the music community and what measures should be put in place to counteract any negative impact it may have on the future of the music industry?
Options of file sharing
There are many options for sharing files on the Internet. One of the most popular ones being peer-to-peer networks (P2P). These websites list all the files so you only have to do a search and the majority of the time you get several results of the same product. All you have to do is to click on the one with the most hits (as these are usually of better quality). These networks allow the sharing of songs but also newly released movies, computer programs and video games.
Another common way to get very large files such as entire albums, sometimes even an entire discography from a certain artist is to use a Torrent, which is a small file which contains all the information needed to download a file the torrent was made for. That means it contains file names, their sizes, where to download from and so on. You can get torrents for almost anything on lots of web sites and torrent search engines.
Bit Torrent is the software, which you download onto your computer to allow the transfer of torrents. It transfers only content specifically associated with a torrent and enables many users to be involved in a transfer without accessing another's computer. Bit Torrent became the most common way to download files since 2009. However it depends on the speed of the Internet connection and the popularity of the file itself. Whilst this type of file sharing is most popular and useful for large movies and games, it is also used for music.
File sharing can be done without using peer-to-peer technologies, for example by the use of a file hosting service, such as Pirate Bay. These sometimes provide collaboration tools such as forums and groups, and allow links for direct downloads to be embedded in other communications such as emails and websites.
Another common way to exchange files is to simply copy a friends CD onto your computer or even burn your own copy, exchange files via a memory stick or even an external hard drive which allows you to take unlimited amounts of music, movies and other files.
History of file sharing
The increasing popularity of the mp3 in the late 1990s brought Napster and other software a massive success. Originally designed to share electronic files, eventually ended up in a huge growth of illegal file sharing of copyright protected files without permission of the artists or their record labels. Other popular networks include Gnutella, Gnutella2, eDonkey2000, Kazaa and BitTorrent. Many of the networks accused of illegal file sharing have been shut by groups such as the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America). During the early 2000s, the fight against copyright violation ended up in lawsuits against individual users of file sharing software.
Regardless of what people may think, there is big file sharing history, especially since it all started before the P2P system was brought in. P2P is mostly responsible for the popularity of file sharing nowadays, as it is the easiest and fastest way, however file sharing started in 1990. If we were to start from the very beginning we would have to go all the way back to 1971 with disk sharing, which was the very first type of file sharing. Back then you would have had to use a device called “ floppy disk”, designed by IBM. Sharing files even back then was as easy as turning on your computer. You copied the files onto your computer and then just distributed it to friends and family and you could have even sold the disk. Computers in the 70’s were not the most popular tool but 20 years on with the development of Cd’s, midi disks and mp3s the file sharing process has got a lot easier and faster.
In 1978, CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System) became the first bulletin board system and was the most common file sharing method. CBBS was a computer software created by Ward Christensen, designed with the intention to exchange information between one another, although it would only work if you had a phone line.
In 1979, Usenet was invented by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. This Software is the one of the oldest Network Communication Systems, which has been used for 3 decades and is still a highly common and popular tool in today’s society. Usenet was developed at the University of North Carolina and Duke University and released to the public in 1980, almost 11 years before the world wide web was unleashed to the public.
Usenet was designed for a time when networks were much slower and sometimes only able to connect once or twice a day.
Usenet has a major importance in today’s network history, as its concept and principal is very similar to today’s peer 2 peer network with the only difference being that by using Usenet its usually the sender who initiates transfers instead of the receiver.
In 1986, File Transfer Protocol (FTB) came on the market. It was a network application with the use of transferring data reliably between the client and server application. The only way this application worked was via a TCP/IP network, such as the Internet.
In 1988 IRC was born, which originally was designed as a chat device in real time. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, similar to the old AOL chat applications. Another supported feature therefore was sharing small files such as pictures from one to another but like with everything else, skilled computer geeks started using this device to illegally share music, movies, software and other files/media in large amounts. The positive aspect of this was that was that you would have needed to be good with computers, therefore it wasn’t such a common way to share files.
In 1990 the World Wide Web was born and that’s when the problems regarding file sharing really started to kick off, followed by the introduction of a file called “MP3” in 1991.
In 1997, Winamp was launched, which was the first music player designed to work with Windows. This software supported the most common music file formats such as MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG 1, AAC, FLAC, WAV and WMA. It was also able to import and play audio CD’s with a feature to burn music to CD’s, which allowed people to distribute it and sell it.
Shortly after the release of Winamp, the first MP3 player (the MPMAN F10) was born. This was when file sharing increased in popularity as it was just a matter of having a computer and being connected to the internet. These two tools could give the user total control over illegally downloading songs/albums onto their mp3 player.
People soon started to realise that there is a lot of money involved in file sharing so Audiogalaxy and Napster were created in 1998 and 1999. Although these were the biggest and most popular file sharing application at the time, it didn’t last long until they were shut down. Audiogalaxy in 2002 and Napster in 2001.
Napster was originally designed by a student at North Eastern University of Boston called Shawn Fanning . Napster was one of the easiest file sharing software around which resulted in it’s popularity. Not only were you able to download music that was difficult to get back then, but also bootleg recordings from concerts and records that hadn’t even been released yet.
After getting all the music for free through Napster, people started to make their own CD’s without paying any royalties to the artist or their record label.
It was originally designed for windows only, as no one thought Napster was going to become that big but later in 2000, Black Hole Media developed a Mac version for Napster called Macster, which was then bought by Napster.
Several bands and artist such as Metallica, Dr Dre and Madonna then filed lawsuits against Napster. Metallica found a demo of theirs, which hadn’t been released at that point on Napster, which was then played on multiple radio stations in the US and led to a catastrophe. They then realized that all of the material was available for download via Napster and therefore filed then a lawsuit against the company.
Shortly after, Dr Dre wrote a letter to Napster asking them to take down his music but Napster disagreed, which then ended up in a similar law suit as Metallicas.
Napster was able to settle both lawsuits, however in 2000 A&M records and several other record companies brought down multimillion-dollar giant. After losing the case, Napster admitted itself bankrupt and sold for 2.43 million us dollars and was later on sold again to electronics Retailer “Best Buy” for 121 million US dollars in 2008.
Looking at the Napster case that Metallica filed I think it was a waste of money for them as well as a waste of time because it resulted in them annoying their fan base and loosing fans and although the company went bankrupt shortly after, their action has not had a major effect on file sharing in the long term as it is now as popular as ever. They could have made their feelings known via the media and put more faith in their fans to go out and buy their record rather than downloading it illegally.
From the collapse of Napster you would think that this would have been the end of file sharing but unfortunately it has the opposite effect.
BitTorrent was born just after Napster’s downfall and in 2003 isoHunt and The Pirate Bay was released and from this point on, every person with a computer could download music and movies 24/7. It even allowed you to download entire discography of artist such as the Beatles. With one mouse click you could download 7 to 8 Giga Bite’s of music, which equates to 40 albums.
The Pirate Bay was the biggest file sharing sites according to the LA Times and was rated as the 107th most popular website. How can a website like that fund all of this if everything on there is for free? It was mainly funded through advertising which is thought to have generated approx $65,000 per month. It had 3.800.000 registered users but you didn’t even have to be registered to the site in order to download media.
After a nine day trial in 2009, all 4 of Pirate Bay’s Swedish creators (Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Carl Lundtroem and Peter Sunde) were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sent to one year in prison and fined the equivalent of over 2 million pounds. The website had 64,800,000 viewers daily and is worth 17,280,000 US Dollars.
The file sharing movement has quickly snow balled in recent years and it’s popularity, especially amongst the younger generation is ever increasing. Whist I agree with the artists mentioned above in the sense that they put all the time and effort into making records to only have people download their music illegally without payment and by loosing this payment it is going to have a long term effect on the music industry and the artists want to preserve the industry, I also think that there will need to be some harsh measures put in place in order to prevent file sharing (which at the moment looks nearly impossible) to both the consumers that are downloading illegally and the companies that set the sites up to enable people to do this.
Impact on artists and record labels
The impact of file sharing on artists depends on whether its a well-known artist or a smaller and not as established artist. For a smaller artist it is a very useful promotional method as once the file is uploaded on to the server it spreads far faster than their record sales would. Therefore more people would get to know their music and would therefore build their fan base much quicker, however established artists/bands such as Lilly Allen, Metallica and Madonna have been vocal about their opinions that they disagree with illegal file sharing as amongst other things it takes away the earning potential of the artist.
“There's no minimizing the impact of illegal file-sharing. It robs songwriters and recording artists of their livelihoods, and it ultimately undermines the future of music itself, not to mention threatening the jobs of tens of thousands” (Cary Sherman, RIAA president, USA Today, 18 September 2003).
“Internet piracy means lost livelihoods and lost jobs, not just in record companies but across the entire music community. For those who think the 10.9% first half sales fall in 2003 does not speak for itself, look at the other evidence. Artist rosters have been cut, thousands of jobs have been lost, from retailers to sound engineers, from truck drivers to music journalists.”
(Jay Berman, IFPI chairman, IFPI Network Newsletter, December 2003).
Madonna and her record company Warner Bros tried to catch people out who were downloading illegal free copies of her album – by replacing them with a brief message from Madonna, saying "What the f*** do you think you're doing?” The fake files were made to look as if they were compressed versions of the songs from Madonna's American Life album, released in April 2003.
However the stunt backfired on the singer as it was not clear if Madonna would be able to claim copyright if anyone released a track which included her message as she would have no way to prove it is her speaking and therefore Warner Bros and Madonna would be unable to claim any royalties.
Another case where an artist has tried to combat file sharing which has resulted in an unsuccessful outcome. What was Madonna hoping to achieve by this? I think that whilst she obviously wanted to take action to prevent people from illegally downloading her music, she could have gone about it a better way, as like Metallica it was a direct attack on the fans. By encouraging fans to buy her music and educating them about the impact of file sharing Madonna could have led they way to giving people a better understanding that it isn’t just the artist that is affected, people a lot further down the chain could be impacted in the long term, like shop workers and journalists.
Between 15th March and 15th April 2004, 2,755 musicians and songwriters responded to an online survey posted by The Pew Internet & American Life Project about the way they use the Internet and their views on copyright and music file-sharing on the Internet. Organisations that participated in the survey include: The Future of Music Coalition, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Nashville Songwriters Association, Garageband, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and the American Federation of Musicians.
When the musicians were asked how free downloading has influenced their career 37% said that free downloading has not really made a difference, 35% said that it has helped and 8% said that it has both helped and hurt their career. Only 5% said that free downloading has exclusively hurt their career and 15% of the respondents answered "do not know".
From these results I think you can see that the major artists in today’s society can and should only speak for themselves as their opinions/experiences obviously do not represent all musicians as over a third of respondents in this survey claim it has actually helped their career. Artists who are trying to make it in the industry or who are just starting out can benefit from free downloading, it can help get their music out to the public who may not wish to buy music from unknown or lesser known artists.
Lilly Allen is one of the artists standing up against today’s file sharing and through her myspace blog she has said the following on the issue:
"I think music piracy is having a dangerous effect on British music, but some really rich and successful artists like Nick Mason from Pink Floyd and Ed O'Brien from Radiohead don't seem to think so," she wrote.
"The Featured Artists Coalition [FAC] also says file sharing's fine because it 'means a new generation of fans for us'. This is great if you're a big artist at the back end of your career with loads of albums to flog to a new audience, but emerging artists don't have this luxury." She added:
"Basically the FAC is saying 'we're alright, we've made it, so file sharing's fine', which is just so unfair to new acts trying to make it in the industry."
Going on to talk about her own debt with her record label and also about record labels investment in A&R, she finished the blog by saying:
"I'm going to be writing to British artists, saying just this: File sharing's not okay for British music. We need to find new ways to help consumers access and buy music legally, but saying file sharing's fine is not helping anyone - and definitely not helping British music."
However, after my research on file sharing I think it doesn’t necessarily hurt the artist financially as concerts and merchandise sales and ring tones are the key to profiting from music, not direct music sales, especially with file sharing being so popular. By targeting merchandise sales and concert tickets as a key area artists should be able to increase their revenue in this area so that they do not rely on the revenue from album sales.
Impact on consumers
File sharing for consumers means an easy, quick and most importantly a free way of obtaining music. The rise in its popularity means that consumers do not need to go to their local music shop and spend money on albums, instead they can download vast volumes of music from file sharing sites for free, albeit illegal.
One of the reasons consumers file share is to ‘try before you buy’ so they can get an idea of the tracks on an artists album before they commit to purchasing the record. Other consumers may only want a couple of tracks from the record and will therefore file share/illegally download a few tracks instead of buying the whole album.
The table below shows sales figures for both overall album sales and digital album sales from 2004 to 2008. You can see that whilst the overall album sales are slowly decreasing the digital album sales have increased dramatically and shows the increase in popularity of purchasing music digitally. This could lead people to the conclusion that with the increase of digitally purchased music it is highly likely that illegal downloads have also increased dramatically during the same period, the reason being that people become more familiar with downloading music online and would therefore have greater knowledge and access to file-sharing or illegal downloading.
|
US Album Sales, 2004–2008 (in millions) |
|||||
|
|
2008 |
2007 |
2006 |
2005 |
2004 |
|
Overall album sales (units sold) |
535.4 |
584.9 |
646.4 |
654.1 |
680.7 |
|
Digital album sales (units sold) |
65.8 |
50.0 |
32.6 |
16.2 |
5.5 |
Source: Nielsen Media Research. © 2007, Nielsen Media Research.
In recent years illegal file sharing has become such a big problem that even governments from multiple countries threatened consumers to cut off the Internet connection. The biggest problem is that millions of consumers do not know what is allowed and what is not and they are not aware what action can be bought against them from the government.
Solutions from the government include working with Internet Service Providers (ISP) to send out warning letters to consumers and repeat offenders will have their internet connection suspended.
I think that consumers purchasing music digitally will of course continue to grow significantly in the near future and this will also lead to an increase in illegal file sharing. I think that education is the key when dealing with illegal file sharers, as many people are not aware that it is in fact illegal and what measures can be bought against them, especially school age children and their parents. Learning about file sharing at school and educating children early on could help reduce the amount of illegal file sharing in the future.
Estimated numbers of downloads each year and its money losses
The largest academic survey of young people's music ownership has found that teenagers and students have an average of more than 800 illegally copied songs on their ipod’s and digital music players and the research also proved that half of 14 to 24-year-olds were happy to share all the music on their hard drive allowing them to copy thousands of songs at one time.
Fergal Sharkey, former lead singer of the Undertones and now chief executive of British Music Rights, said: “I was one of those people who went around the back of the bike shed with songs I had taped off the radio the night before. But this totally dwarfs that, and anything we expected.”
The study also showed that a teenager’s music player holds around 1,770 songs, meaning that 48 per cent of the music is copied illegally and it rises to 61 per cent among 14 to 17-year-olds. Also 14 percent of a teenagers CD collection were copied illegally from friends and almost two thirds of youngsters aged 14 to 17 share songs via email and copying all the songs from someone else’s hard drive which allows you to take 10.000 songs or more in one go.
The research showed that around 1.3 million people used shared content on a peer-to-peer network on a weekday and if each person downloaded only one item a day, there would be 4.73 billion downloads each year, which means that it would work out to 120 million pounds downloaded illegally each year.
"We know that the copyright industries in the UK are suffering huge losses due to illegal downloading," said David Lammy, Minister of State for Intellectual Property. "It is important that we understand how online consumer behaviour impacts on the UK economy and the future sustainability of our copyright industries."
Mr Lammy said: "We can't expect 12-year-olds to become copyright lawyers before they can switch on a computer, but we can educate people on enforcement and work towards getting the right people caught and punished: wherever they live."
The figures below show more statistics related to file-sharing:
- An estimated 20 billion songs are downloaded each year which equates to 4.2 billion dollars worth of music
- There is an estimated annual loss of £325m to British record companies
- It is thought that file sharing involves 7 billion unauthorised music files at any one time
- 75% of all the illegal files come from only 15% of the people
- In the US piracy cost 171,060 people their jobs in 2007
- 2.8bn MP3 files traded on Napster
- Kazaa (a source of illicit music and film downloads) had to pay a total of £100million damages to the world’s four leading music companies in compensation for lost sales
By looking at the figures above you can see how far file sharing has actually come and how much money is lost on downloads every day. This should open our eyes we should try to look for solutions instead of just complaining or not wanting to see the problem and therefore never being able to stop it.
Solutions
Like it or not, people share music over the Internet. And they’re going to keep doing so no matter what laws are brought in. The problem facing the music industry is how to turn people off the idea and persuade them to keep buying records. Here are some possible solutions on how to provide the lost money for the artists.
1. One solution could be adding a required tax to UK residents. To raise enough money to help roll out broadband across the country, the Government added a £0.50 “tax” on top of every monthly phone bill. There are approximately 34 million landlines in the UK, which will make £17 million a month. Add another £1 to this as a ‘download tax’ and you will generate £51 million. This extra money can then be used to cover the losses of the artists and record companies.
2. Another way would be if phone companies or internet providers such as BT, Orange, Carphone Warehouse, etc… came up with a monthly package so that the customer can download unlimited songs from their phones or computers by adding an additional £5 to their monthly phone or/and Internet bill. This fee should be non negotiable and be paid by every customer whether they want to download music or not otherwise the extra fee wouldn’t work as everyone as would remain downloading illegally and for free. In the UK there are over 34 million people with Internet access, which works out to 57% of the countries population. So if the internet providers charge everyone an additional £5 on top of their monthly bill for unlimited download access it would result in over 170 million pound being generated each month.
“Unauthorised P2P filesharing of copyright material is fundamentally a market issue which needs to be addressed through a range of commercial means“- BT
3. Apple has introduced over 10 models of ipods, including the Mini, the Nano and the Shuffle, since first launching it in October 2001, which leads me to the next possible solution. Apple could pay a percentage cost for every giga byte on every Ipod ever sold to cover the cost of their customers downloading music illegally. For instance Apple sells an Ipod with 30gb of space and if every gb costs them 5p then it would generate £1.50 from each 30gb ipod sold. Between 2001 and 2007 Apple sold more then 100 million ipods so even if every Ipod only had 2gb of space then it would have generated 1 billion pounds but considering that some Ipods have 160Gb of space it would have generated considerably more, definitely enough to repay the artists for their work.
“The iPod is officially the fastest-selling music player in history after selling 100 million since its launch just over five years ago”. Telegraph
For any of the above solutions to work the governments in all countries throughout the world would need to ensure that the laws concerning illegal file-sharing become tougher and deter people from wanting to download material illegally, this would then make people more willing to pay an upfront cost through one of the above mentioned solutions.
Conclusion
After all my research for this essay, opinions and quotes from artists and music industry people, as well as possible government solutions, I have made up my own opinion about file sharing.
I think that you cannot accuse one single person or party for illegal file sharing, there is not really anyone to blame but at the same time you could say everyone is to blame, everyone that has bought a record and lent it to their friend, the government for not educating people on the subject and musicians who haven’t stood up for their rights as recording artists.
Still, some people are trying to increase the popularity of file sharing and others are trying to prevent it in ways, which are obviously not helping. Even the governments action of threatening people with cutting off their phone lines has sparked controversy as it is too radical, therefore we must find better ways to tackle the problem that are more thought through.
To be honest I personally don’t mind file sharing too much as I am looking at the whole thing from a consumers point of view as I am a consumer, however I can understand both arguments and I know that soon we will get to a point where we have to decide what to do and how to prevent illegal file sharing. The whole thing is mostly a money issue from the artist/record company side and I think the solutions that I provided above are definitely realistic and achievable.
The recording and music industry would have to work hand in hand with other companies, internet providers, television and radio channels and other promotional methods so that everyone is informed of the alternatives to illegal file sharing and ensure that consumers know what is available to them.
Introducing a more controlled way of file sharing is the only way to prevent illegal file sharing in the long run, as it would be the best way to keep everyone happy.
