People have always had difficulty with the part of copyright law that says
"you do not have the right to copy". Sabiene Heindl, the general manager of
Music Industry Piracy Investigations, says: "Currently, 18 per cent of the
population uses file-sharing systems, averaging 30 song downloads per month.
That's 2.8 million people illegally swapping 1billion songs a year."
Download culture would not exist without a corresponding upload culture.
"There are online communities where individuals get kudos for the number of
files they upload to the internet," says Heindl. "It's not unusual for each
person to upload 10,000 songs."
And those figures, she says, are just the background chorus of a universal
refrain. "We don't have exact figures for how many times each store-bought CD is
copied," she says, "but record stores continually report they're selling just
one CD single to groups of teenagers."
It's not just teenagers looking for a free Top 10 top-up. Who hasn't been to
a Saturday afternoon barbecue and noted the host's music collection consists of
copied CDs? Who knows whether those CDs were copied from authentic or pirated
products? Piracy puts an estimated 4.5 million illegal CDs into the Australian
market each year.
And then there are music blogs - enthusiasts posting their record collections
online. There are at least 50 million blogs offering free songs and albums, most
of them copyright. There is also the billion-plus songs that are offered free,
no copyright attached, on artists' sites like MySpace and YouTube. (MySpace and
YouTube also host illegal files by the hundreds of thousands.)
The biggest online music marketer, iTunes, co-opts the role of record
companies to espouse new music by offering a free single of the week - the two
most recent are from local indie outfits, the Basics and Old Man River. "It's
not rocket science to translate the sum of this activity to lost sales," says
Heindl.
And lost jobs. Record companies are shedding executives. Last fortnight it
was EMI Australia's turn to slash its senior management team. In the US and
Britain, music retail chains have closed and this year is tipped as the year
global reality will affect Australian music retailers.
The cause of this turmoil is people copying music. But copying music has been
rife since the mid-1970s. It is only now record companies are feeling the
impact. As a music carrier, the cassette tape was great for dictation, the
purpose for which it was invented. Yet cassettes soon rivalled, then outsold
vinyl records. Today, despite an official sales figure of zero, there remains a
market for pirated cassettes. "Customs just recently seized a large haul of
them," says Heindl.
By the late '70s, cassette-players incorporated Dolby noise suppression, and
chromium-dioxide cassettes boosted the listening experience. Then the public
went wild for the Sony Walkman - music that travelled with you. The lesson was
that people wanted their music portable. The cassette also empowered people to
create their playlists - the car-tape of favourite songs, the mix-tape that was
a gift of music to another, the copy-tape that saved wearing out the precious
vinyl.
The recording business initiated a public awareness campaign on the wrongs of
home taping - that home taping is against the law and hurts musicians by
depriving them of income.
The public didn't see it that way.
Isn't playing a record at a party public broadcasting? And if I've bought the
album, why should I have to buy a separate cassette of the same music for the
car? Anyway, if a multinational recording company says it's wrong to tape, it
should speak to the multinational company that makes cassette players with
high-speed dubbing and one-touch recording.
The public also had difficulty agreeing with the argument that every home dub
deprived a musician of income. The counter-argument was that home taping spread
the music, creating demand for the record company package.
Did it really matter? Album sales were on a roll in the 1980s. The 12-inch
vinyl album was the flagship of contemporary rock. Album cover packaging -
double or triple gatefolds, lavish lyric booklets - inspired a slew of rock
album cover books. Yet cassettes, with scaled down and often blurred artwork,
outsold vinyl from 1984. The public wasn't sold on packaging - it just wanted
music in most convenient form.
And then the CD wiped out the cassette. Unlike the cassette, the CD was
formulated to reproduce music. It used a sampling theorem, a series of digital
snapshots, which the human ear hears as a stream of music. CDs reproduced bass
better than vinyl, and had a greater dynamic range than cassette tape. And,
theoretically, a CD never wore out.
Introduced in 1982, CD albums outsold cassettes in 1991. Home taping was
still rife but people first had to buy the CD. And, even though CDs cost more
than twice the price of records, generations of music buyers junked vinyl and
reconstituted their collections on CD.
The first CD burners were sold in the late '90s, costing between $1000 and
$10,000. Blank discs cost $20 each.
But by 2002 CD burners were standard hardware for home computers and blank
CDs cost about $2. The public switched from home taping to home burning. But
people still had to access a CD. Either buy it or borrow it or ask a friend to
burn a copy. Copying remained a local activity.
By the late '70s, cassette-players incorporated Dolby noise suppression, and
chromium-dioxide cassettes boosted the listening experience. Then the public
went wild for the Sony Walkman - music that travelled with you. The lesson was
that people wanted their music portable. The cassette also empowered people to
create their playlists - the car-tape of favourite songs, the mix-tape that was
a gift of music to another, the copy-tape that saved wearing out the precious
vinyl.
The recording business initiated a public awareness campaign on the wrongs of
home taping - that home taping is against the law and hurts musicians by
depriving them of income.
The public didn't see it that way.
Isn't playing a record at a party public broadcasting? And if I've bought the
album, why should I have to buy a separate cassette of the same music for the
car? Anyway, if a multinational recording company says it's wrong to tape, it
should speak to the multinational company that makes cassette players with
high-speed dubbing and one-touch recording.
The public also had difficulty agreeing with the argument that every home dub
deprived a musician of income. The counter-argument was that home taping spread
the music, creating demand for the record company package.
Did it really matter? Album sales were on a roll in the 1980s. The 12-inch
vinyl album was the flagship of contemporary rock. Album cover packaging -
double or triple gatefolds, lavish lyric booklets - inspired a slew of rock
album cover books. Yet cassettes, with scaled down and often blurred artwork,
outsold vinyl from 1984. The public wasn't sold on packaging - it just wanted
music in most convenient form.
And then the CD wiped out the cassette. Unlike the cassette, the CD was
formulated to reproduce music. It used a sampling theorem, a series of digital
snapshots, which the human ear hears as a stream of music. CDs reproduced bass
better than vinyl, and had a greater dynamic range than cassette tape. And,
theoretically, a CD never wore out.
Introduced in 1982, CD albums outsold cassettes in 1991. Home taping was
still rife but people first had to buy the CD. And, even though CDs cost more
than twice the price of records, generations of music buyers junked vinyl and
reconstituted their collections on CD.
The first CD burners were sold in the late '90s, costing between $1000 and
$10,000. Blank discs cost $20 each.
But by 2002 CD burners were standard hardware for home computers and blank
CDs cost about $2. The public switched from home taping to home burning. But
people still had to access a CD. Either buy it or borrow it or ask a friend to
burn a copy. Copying remained a local activity.
