It's The End Of The World As We Know It

In the field of opportunism it’s Armagideon time again (spot The Clash reference – ed). Since the turn of the century, the primary entertainment industries – music, film and publishing – have been undergoing one long (and some say long overdue) panic attack as they try to keep pace with digital innovations that have transformed, or are in the process of transforming, the market. Picture a lumbering bison plagued by a multitude of flies carrying lots of nasty viruses.

Since new technology facilitated widespread file-sharing, the music business in particular has been ripped and burned, uploaded, downloaded, pillaged, plundered, frequently outwitted and – in some people’s eyes at least – left for dead. Of course, they said that videos would kill the film business and they were wrong – but they just might be right on this occasion.
The prognosis of the prophets of doom is a familiar one: dinosaur models must evolve, and fast, or face extinction. At worst we’re facing into doomsday for the industry as we knew it, at best a replay of the free-for-all post-war frontier days of rock ‘n’ roll when piranha-sized labels like Savoy, King and Apollo waxed rapacious by means of bootstrap capitalism (and in the process produced a motherlode of prehistory for those who thought life began with Elvis).
Anarchy waned. By the late 1960s rock lost its roll and got Inc-ed: album sales outstripped the nimble single, ushering in the era of CSN&Y stadium tours, cocaine cowboys, Fleetwood Mac, Hotel California, the heyday of Warners, Columbia and David Geffen. The main players might have changed, but the boom continued throughout the 1980s when MTV gave the industry a new avenue into every teenager’s synapses. The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor, as Leonard Cohen put it. Thriller, Madonna, The Joshua Tree followed, leading us right into the 1990s when mainstream hip-hop emerged as the new cock rock and soft pop.
Then came the millennial reckoning of digital end-times. The barcoded beasts of Revelations, a PC in every home, and next stop on the rollercoaster Napster and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich versus Chuck D on the Charlie Rose show.
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Sales drop. Layoffs, acquisitions and mergers follow. The Big Six shrinks to a four party system but they are still not coping with the new dispensation. The internet continues to colonise new territories, mainly though not exclusively for US-based capitalism. Myspace (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media) and YouTube (owned by the Google conglomerate) and social networking sites provide a return to a Moore Street set-out-your-own-stall business model – except that (a) no one seems to be paying much for anything; and (b) the street is owned lock, stock and barrel by people who are making money out of every scrap of information they can trace about you and your new found ‘friends’.
Luxury liner-scaled labels struggle to protect themselves against smaller, faster, pirate vessels – though again, with the possible exception of Domino in the UK, there is scant evidence of new labels with any identity emerging from the murk. And then – labouring fast to retrofit as all-round entertainment conglomerates – the established labels begin to muscle in on merchandising and touring revenue via 360 deals. The big promoters, meanwhile, start to apply the same logic in reverse, with Live Nation signing Madonna for just about everything she does.
Lots of people are scrabbling, and no-one is sure what is working and what isn’t, though this much is true: all is changed utterly. Albums are still selling, but your average toddler, tween, teen and twenty-something now tends to cherry-pick from a deli tray of music rather than experiencing deep immersion in one long player at a time. Techno-savvy tykes educate their mums and dads in new technology. Who among us hasn’t, whether wittingly or unwittingly, begged, borrowed or stolen music, even if it’s in a form as benign as doing a YouTube search on a suddenly remembered tune. MGMT’s ‘Kids’ never mainlined so much music. For free.
“All these big organisations, big record labels are full of people who don’t know anything about computers,” the Scottish producer and hitmaker Calvin Harris, who infamously launched an expletive laden attack on the BPI via Twtter recently, argued. “80% of their staff are old school and they don’t know how to deal with it, but they don’t want to admit that either. I think that’s the big problem.”
The upshot? The labels are hurting. So are the ancillary industries. And inevitably, they are fighting back, or at least trying to. As was widely reported in the domestic media, last January, the Irish arms of EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner Music took the chief Irish Internet Service Provider, Eircom, to court in order to ensure that it watchdogs its networks for illegal file-sharing. The major record companies scored a significant victory, extracting a settlement out of Eircom. The resulting agreement took the shape of a ‘three strike’ policy, under which customers involved in copyright-infringing activity get a series of warnings before having their broadband disconnected for repeated transgressions.
“It was an agreement between Eircom and ourselves called the Graduated Response,” explains Dick Doyle of the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA), “which means that the response gets tougher as you go along and you’re not reacting to it. That pilot programme is going into operation now, so we’ll have more details in about two months on that one. Eircom are by far the biggest ISP in the country, with more than 40% of the traffic, so it was important that we had to start with the biggest guys possible on this one. But we have now issued proceedings against BT/ESAT and UPC/NTL. They are the next two biggest in line. Those proceedings have been accepted into the commercial court and we’ll probably be in court in mid-January 2010 with them.”
But just when the international entertainment industry thought it couldn’t get any worse, a new peril emerged, not from the tropics, nor the cradle of Mesopotamia, nor even Beijing or North Korea. Nope, it came from the home of the Britney hit machine. And it was flying the Jolly Roger as a flag of convenience…

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish-based website that describes itself as the world’s largest BitTorrent index and tracking facility. What, you might well ask, does that mean? A BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file-sharing ‘protocol’ that distributes large amounts of data in a way that enables users to download music, movies or porno classics with names like ZOMBIE CO-EDS GO DOUBLE ANAL III, without your common-or-garden PC or laptop having a nervous breakdown. So far, you might say, so good.
The Pirate Bay’s database contains the titles of 500,000 movies, TV shows, songs, games and software products, most of which have been illegally copied. The website does not itself host illegally downloadable material: rather, its business model is based on the idea that it will direct the user to a guy who does. Last winter, the website recorded some 26 million ‘peers’, and claimed three and a half million registered users (registration being required only to access the website’s porn content). It makes money through advertising revenue, although how much is not clear.
In April, the LA Times profiled The Pirate Bay, describing it as the “one of the world’s largest facilitators of illegal downloading”, and “the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright – or pro-piracy – movement.”
Depending on your perspective, the founders of The Pirate Bay have become the new poster boys for (a) digital thievery that robs the entertainment industry and artists of vast revenues, or (b) a righteous Robin Hood process of sticking it to The Man while flying the flag for ideologies that confront outmoded Capitalist copyright strictures. So what is the reality?
The website has had repeated run-ins with the law. A raid on its premises in 2006 resulted in a temporary disruption, although it was operational again within three days. While that was but a skirmish, things have escalated to a point where – in theory at least – the activities of the site may no longer be either legally or financially viable. Last April 17 in a Swedish court, Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay, plus businessman Carl Lundström, who provided seed funding for the website, were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement, and sentenced to a year in prison, in addition to being hit with a fine the equivalent of two and half million Euros. The defendants have appealed (under Swedish law the verdict is not lawful until the appeals have been processed).
Since then it’s been business as usual. In the Irish context, a spokesman for Eircom confirmed to Hot Press that, “at the moment The Pirate Bay is accessible. Part of the terms of the agreement that was made back in January was that if the record companies made an application asking the court to enforce that we prevent access to the site, we would not oppose that. To date that has not happened. As they have not made that application, the site remains live.”
But in the last month there’s been a potentially crucial development. The Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB has announced that it intends to buy the website, in August, for the equivalent of some five million euros. The company’s CEO Hans Pandeya said, “In order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File-sharers need faster downloads and better quality.”
The Pirate Bay founders have stated that profits from the sale would be placed in an offshore account for future funnelling into pro-freedom of speech, freedom of information and what they term ‘openness of Internet projects’.
“The old crew is still around in different ways,” they said. “We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internet – quite the opposite.”
Which, as many industry insiders suggest, has the distinct whiff of meet the new boss, same as the old boss. In other words, we may be witnessing the Napster scenario all over again.
“Don’t fully believe the spin,” says Dick Doyle of IRMA. “I think meetings have gone on and internationally we’re not certain that they are buying it out, or that part of the deal would be based on them getting approval of rights which they are not near to getting. Will The Pirate Bay go legit? Put it this way: The Pirate Bay at this moment in time are still trading illegally, they haven’t changed at all from what they were, so as far as I’m concerned, they’re still an illegal operation. I’m very dubious about the whole thing.”
Others in the industry agree.
“I think it’s a sinister move,” says Stephen Anderson, Belfast publicist and founder of Unleash The Bats, a campaign and forum for music industry professionals, musicians and executives from around the world engaged in targeting file-sharing and illegal downloading, among other issues.
“Pirate Bay was always primed for a sale,” he continues. “What was sold?”
An index of links to illegally downloadable material.
“And a database of people who do that. Who would want that information? My suspicions are: one of the big corporations, or (the corporations) collectively. All roads lead to them. I think they’re going to go for potential customers. I think there’ll be a subscription fee of five, ten euros, and people will foolishly believe that it’s semi-illegal and the money that’s brought in will be divvied up between them.”
The Pirate Bay court case has had a knock-on effect for other Swedish pro-Piracy lobbies such as The Pirate Party, a political party that boasts the third largest membership numbers of any Swedish party (almost 50,000 members, outstripping the Green Party, The Left Party and the Christian Democrats) and whose agenda includes reform of copyright and patent law, plus right to privacy (online and off) and transparency of State administration issues. Although the party claims it doesn’t have any official connection to The Pirate Bay beyond shared ideology, its numbers rocketed after the Swedish court’s verdict.
“In the week following the sentence we got I think 35,000 new members,” says Pirate Party member Anna Troberg. “It went from being like 5,000 people and now we’re at about 50,000 people. But the pirate movement is so much bigger than The Pirate Bay. We have the Pirate Party, who are trying to change laws from within, through the European Parliament and hopefully also the Swedish Parliament, and then we have the Pirate Bureau that work a lot with art and try to communicate the pirates’ ideology through all projects. I actually think that The Pirate Bay was one of their projects from the very beginning and then it disconnected from them. So there are many different levels.”
Hasn’t the projected buy-out caused something of a credibility crisis?
“Oh yeah, that is a problem, and I know when news of the possible sale came out, of course a lot of people were shocked. We don’t know if or how it’s going to be sold, but as it looks now they will put the money into a fund that will work for freedom of speech and freedom on the Internet. It won’t be for them to sit on a nice island in the Bahamas for the rest of their lives.”
The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, has suffered further credibility damage through allegations made by Swedish anti-racist magazine Expo and numerous online sources such as The Register and NewTeeVee that one of the website’s financiers, Carl Lundström, was a member of the right wing Nationalist organisation Bevara Sverige Svenskt – Keep Sweden Swedish – and also funded various far-right organisations. (The Pirate Bay’s co-founder Tobias Andersson was grilled on the matter on the Swedish television show Bert – the footage is available on YouTube, with subtitles.) On the face of it, this doesn’t sit too well with The Pirate Bay’s self-professed libertarian hipster bent.
“Personally I think it’s unfortunate,” says Anna Troberg, “ but I don’t think it has affected much, because the guys who have been running The Pirate Bay had no connections with that, so I think they fared fairly well.”
Stephen Anderson makes no bones about his opinions regarding Lundström’s involvement, although it’s fair to say that the political leanings of The Pirate Bay’s funding sources need not necessarily reflect on the website itself.
“No, but I find it very negative in the sense that on The Pirate Bay they openly claimed that they wanted to destroy the music industry,” Anderson says. “We’ve all had our gripes with the music industry. I’ve worked in it all my life. But working in Hot Press you will come across people like me, and the common denominator is: we’re all passionate about music. The only thing The Pirate Bay and those behind it are passionate about is their malicious intent. This was never, ‘Do it for the kids’ – this cannot be equated to punk rock or anything like that. It does nothing for the development of music or artists, all it does is provide people with an opportunity to take music and not pay for it and promote a flawed idea that culture should be free.
“I spoke to the gentleman who is the member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party (Christian Engström) and I asked him, live on one of the Dublin radio stations, how this was benefiting musicians and to explain to me why their mission was to destroy the music industry, and he had no answer. I also asked if he was funded by Carl Lundström. He didn’t know and said he’d only met him one time. I asked him if they were associated with The Pirate Bay at any time and he said no, they were a separate organisation.
“I also pointed out to him that on The Pirate Bay website they were claiming that all the money that they’d raised from the sale of their merchandising was directly funding The Pirate Party and he didn’t seem to know this. That’s absolute bollocks. Let’s be honest about it, they’re all in it together.”
So he doesn’t buy the idea of The Pirate Bay as a conglomeration of, at best, merry pranksters, at worst, armchair anarchists?
“No, they’re intelligent people. Who is it Lundström wants to destroy? Is it the music industry, or is it those who he perceives to be in control of the music industry? People need to think long and hard about that. There’s something else going on here, it isn’t simply about anarchists doing it for the kids.”
Anderson sees echoes of a far darker era.
“I believe there’s an element of anti-Semitism at play,” he says. “I believe that it’s the big bad Jews who control the music industry and the media who are being targeted by certain right wing elements, and I think the groundswell of the far right across Europe as evidenced in the recent European elections is very alarming.
“And I would ask all these so-called libertarians to turn the clock back to the '20s. Who owned the art galleries, who had the big art collections, who were the goldsmiths, who were the diamond traders, who were the people who were involved in fine art and the performing arts? I’m not being melodramatic here. I honestly believe there is a significant element of that. I also feel that those directly involved in The Pirate Bay and those behind it, their broader agenda is finding a way to develop software that will enhance their telecommunications business model, and they see the music industry as a casualty.”
Maybe this is not the key battle-ground anyway. The Pirate Bay is the Aldi or Lidl of hacking culture, the port of call of file-sharing’s lowest common denominator. Any tracker or torrent, peer-to-peer file share system or third party hosting server like Rapidshare or Megaupload is only the most public point of contact. Your humble music blog doesn’t store content; it just links to it. If a pirate watchdog like Web Sheriff, the UK-based internet policing company used by labels like Domino and artists like Prince, disables one link, chances are that dozens more will take its place. So what’s the wellspring? 
Imagine, if you will, a secret brotherhood of techies who can sketch for you every frame of Blade Runner or Tetsuo: the Iron Man, who probably spent their formative years jacked into Tangerine Dream or The Orb, and while the rest of us were out in the fresh air, buried their noses in sacred texts like Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash or William Gibson’s Neuromancer. (Increasingly, Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, published 25 years ago, is starting to looking like an uncannily prophetic roadmap of the entertainment industry’s current afflictions, from the cheap bootleg hardware through the Russian mobsters to the intrigues involving corporations interfacing with self-styled cyber-outlaws and black economy profiteers.) 
So who controls the eye at the top of the Illuminati pyramid? The answer to that question may be elusive, but there is certainly a hacker elite who pride themselves on code-breaking for the thrill of it. One source with a background in hacking groups that specialised in cracking gaming codes as far back as the early-1990s spoke to Hot Press under condition of anonymity.
“The whole Pirate Bay thing is a bit of a smokescreen,” Mr.X says. “Anyone who’s serious about downloading music wouldn’t use websites like that anymore because they’re very easy to trace. People log onto that not knowing that they’re at risk. It’s simple: you can be tracked, the location of your computer can be logged, and the riguors of the law unleased upon you.
“It is widely assumed that record companies, on occasion, will actually leak albums on purpose to try and track people down, but they’re not catching serial offenders, they’re catching people who wouldn’t know any better, the people who read an article in the Sunday Times about it and then go, ‘Oh let’s get these Michael Jackson albums for free’.”
Which is like cops nabbing the tourist visiting the Mexican whorehouse for the first time – whereas the experts are in Private Tracker groups.
“A private tracker is like a ‘theme’ group you have to be invited into, from where a lot of the illegal music, movies and software would originate. They require registration at the tracker website, which means each torrent can be monitored, and they can restrict access to files to prevent unauthorized distribution of torrent files.”
There is a cat and mouse aspect to it – a game in which people test their skills against those of the key-holders.
“These private tracker societies grew out of groups formed in the early ‘80s through software piracy. Basically as soon as digital content became available, that’s when it started to become attractive to hacker groups, people who would just ‘crack’ the latest release for the fun of it. They’d get a copy that was encoded – and break the code to make it available.
“What happened was when the likes of the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST home computers were released, they used inexpensive floppy discs, so it made it a lot easier for game content to be distributed. So these ‘cracking’ groups saw it as a badge of honour, that if you got the latest version of Sonic The Hedgehog it was uploaded to what back then were called bulletin board sites. They developed ‘elite’ sections within them, where trusted members exchanged the pirated software, known as ‘warez’.”
So this was not just about acquiring product for bootlegging. This was a social scene, a peer group and pissing contest based around techie one-upmanship. 
“Essentially. Friends of mine used to go to a central location and one guy would have a modem, and he’d be downloading the games and distributing them among the group. When you have a private group that has software, they say they do it for the honour of cracking the code. It is a badge of achievement that they hacked it first. They’re not interested in releasing it to the public, they’re releasing it amongst themselves.”
The same attitude has been taken into the music arena. There’s a cache associated with being first to upload an album, with records often becoming available months before their release date. So what are the sources of the leaks? How do finished masters get into the hands of the people who can ‘release’ them unofficially online?
“There are so many possibilities. For a long time, journalists, DJs and reviewers were suspected as being the main source, and so various strategies have been implemented to make this less likely with water-marked copies, special secure URLs that people have to log onto to review a record – and so on. But a lot of very high security releases have appeared online in advance, so the list of potential culprits narrows. In one instance it might be a studio engineer, in another someone from the record company. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could come up with a fully secure system, once people are involved and there is an element of trust or discretion required.”
Is any circle ever really fully closed?
“The answer is no. Even where the private tracker groups are concerned, when someone else comes into the group, that’s when material gets brought outside and starts to proliferate. The private groups are not happy about that because it’s easier for them to get caught. They’re very much against the whole thing of people burning music on street corners.”
Or to put it another way, while they might like to outwit the Man, they don’t really want to share the fruits of their labour with the masses.
“If you log-on to a lot of the private chat groups, you’ll see that they have named and shamed people who have made stuff more widely available. They do this by publishing their personal accounts, personal phone numbers – so they will go after them, they’re ruthless. These private groups have been doing it for years and they are still around, so they’re obviously good at what they do, but once the stuff gets onto public forums, like The Pirate Bay, that’s when it becomes trouble for them, ’cos it can be linked back.”
Either way, the ramifications are complicated and far-reaching.
“You have the 18-year-old computer nerd genius beating his peers to be the first one to make an album available online, but you also have the crime syndicates as well, the Russian mp3 sites that are legally allowed to be there in Russia – but morally they’re off the radar. They exist because the law in Russia allows them to but they’re usurping the rights to material and selling mp3s on the world market for 12 cents or something. They can only do that because they have in effect stolen the music in the first place.”

The moral and ethical questions are not just about artists being paid for their work. Any technological innovation quickly becomes a market for age-old vices: from the daguerreotype to the penny dreadful, the peep show to pornography. The Pirate Bay website advises users to report any instances of child abuse and provides a link to the relevant Swedish authorities. But in September 2008 it was reported that The Pirate Bay provided a link to leaked pictures from the autopsy of two murdered children in what became known as the Arboga case, which caused the father of the victims to urge the website to have the torrent removed.
“It looks bad,” admits Anna Troberg of The Pirate Party. “That thing was strange because this was public material. Normally the court decides to take away material like that and for some strange reason they didn’t take away those pictures. Before the media started reporting that these court papers were there, there were like 30, 50, 60 people that had downloaded it. This was a report of 1,700 pages and there were a few pictures in the middle somewhere – but as soon as the media started reporting it then in one or two days there were 30,000 people that had viewed it.”
Anna seems to be anxious to spread the blame.
“So of course people were upset with The Pirate Bay,” she adds, “but there was also quite a big discussion on the media’s responsibility in this. The court has some responsibility ’cos they should have taken away the pictures, the Pirate Bay kept the link up, so that was their responsibility, and then the media made sure that everybody knew that they could find it there. It’s hard to get clear answers.”
The argument has been advanced that the most workable analogy for internet piracy is the drug trade. You can bust the dealer, but it won’t dismantle the basic system of supply and demand. Suing some suburban soccer mom because her kid illegally downloaded Lady GaGa is like arresting someone at a rock festival for carrying a pellet of hash. None of us will admit to it, but we’ve all done it, or are related to someone who has. Ethics aside, illegal downloading is mainstream stuff, as IRMA and other rights agencies know all too well.
“That’s why we gave up as such on the original scenario, which was go after the individual infringer directly,” says Dick Doyle. “From our last survey, which was carried out by Behaviour and Attitudes, there are something like 250,000 people in Ireland, who claim to have been involved in illegal file-sharing. You can’t sue 250,000 people, so what you try and do is stop the pipe distributing the illegal content, and that’s what we’re trying to do. If it’s not flowing across the network then people can’t get it.”
And what’s the biggest pipe? Let’s ask Mr X.
“Actually the biggest purveyor of any pirate links is Google,” he says. “The way Google-bots search through the web, it picks up these links very quickly, so if you put in Franz Ferdinand, Rapid Share, new album, you’ll find links to it in a matter of seconds. There was an interesting thing with Franz Ferdinand, when their album was ‘released’ on the web about a month before the official date, they started posting all the links on blogs – but then Web Sheriff started basically saying, ‘Please take it down, you’re hurting the independents’. These guys deal with Prince and Madonna and all the rest of it, they monitor the links that are going around and try to cut them off at
the pass.
“There’s been lots of comments from pirate sites about the whole thing, saying, ‘Franz Ferdinand say sharing is fine, but (their label) Domino are going after people, yet Domino made lots of money out of Arctic Monkeys when all their demo stuff was distributed, so you can’t have it both ways’.”
It is a circular argument, but one that may circumnavigate an inconvenient truth: the creators – rather than any disconnected third party – should be the ones to decide whether or not their rights are to be waived.

And where do the musicians stand? Well, they’re as diverse as humanity itself, but it’s fair to say that illegal downloading hurts the big acts way more than the minnows. Consequently, U2 have been vociferous about piracy as theft, while Prince and Van Morrison have been particularly assertive about removing footage of even live performances from YouTube.
“People think people like me are overpaid and over-nourished, and they’re not wrong,” Bono told USA Today last March. “What they’re missing is, how does a songwriter get paid? It’s not the place for rich rock stars to ask for more money, but somebody should fight for fellow artists, because this is madness. Music has become tap water, a utility, where for me it’s a sacred thing, so I’m a little offended. The music business has been thrown to the dogs legislatively. That will change when file-sharing of TV shows and movies becomes as easy as songs. Somebody is going to call the cops.”
By contrast, Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold has gone on the record as saying illegal downloading allows musicians a far greater recourse to influences and inspiration. “The more music a musician can hear, that will only make music richer as an art form,” he told the BBC. “I think we’re seeing that now, with tons of new bands that are amazing, and are doing way better music now than was being made pre-Napster. That was how I discovered almost everything when I was a teenager – my dad brought home a modem. I’ve discovered so much music through that medium.”
As for the ethics of illegal downloading, Pecknold said: “I’ve downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records – why would I care if somebody downloads ours? That’s such a petty thing to care about. I mean, how much money does one person need? I think it’s disgusting when people complain about that, personally.”
Which is any artist’s individual prerogative: if you want to give your music away free, by all means do so (although if you’re signed to a label, you might want to call up the folks who work to promote and distribute your records and explain where the Christmas bonus has gone). Dick Doyle: “I’ve said all along that if somebody wants to give away their work for nothing, it’s totally their property and the best of luck to them. That doesn’t mean they have to impose that on other people who don’t want their work to be given away for nothing.”
Oft-cited comparisons with the rather ludicrous Home Taping is Killing Music campaigns of the '70s and '80s are outmoded: back then we didn’t have the Internet. So how does the Piracy Party reconcile its freedom of speech and anti-copyright stance with the artist’s basic need to get paid? Anna Troberg, a published novelist, claims to see both sides of the argument.
“File sharing in a sense works like PR,” she says. “There is independent research from, I think Harvard did a study and I think the Dutch government ordered an expert study about this as well. And both these studies show that people who file share a lot also buy a huge amount more music and cinema tickets compared to other people.
“But I think the music industry is putting artists in a very awkward position. We know that the most important relationship within the music industry is the relationship between the musicians and their fans. And in the end the money always comes from the fans. However, the music industry puts the artist in a very weird situation when they go out so strongly and say file sharers are killing music and taking your revenues away. And they get quite a lot of artists to go out very strongly against file sharers.’
The other side of that coin is that there are a lot of artists who are opposed to file sharing, who do see their livelihood being taken away, but who are afraid that they’ll be seen as ‘unhip’ if they tell the truth. Anna Troberg offers a different twist on the same phenomenon.
“You have a situation in Sweden where more than two million people file share here, very frequently, and they’ve actually stopped buying things from people that go out very strongly against file sharing,” she claims, “’cos they feel hard done by. It’s a complete PR disaster. There have been authors who get their books sent back to them because people feel, ‘Why are you harassing me – I did buy your book and you’re still calling me a thief?’”
Cue obnoxious cinema ads about film piracy haranguing those of us who’ve already paid in to see the movie. But Stephen Anderson, for one, doesn’t buy that line.
“One music industry person who I respect tremendously, his comment was you’re getting onto dangerous ground when you start to call your customers thieves. You’ve got to make a distinction. Is your customer someone who buys your products or someone who takes it for free? I’m a small PR company. My business is affected by this, my sales are down in the region of 70%. I know one lady who lost her job at one of the independent UK record distributors and had her home repossessed, a young mother with two children who’s gone through the humiliation of having to go back to live with her parents because the music industry is on its ear.
“These aren’t big moguls or millionaire pop stars who can give music away free and think they’re being clever, to strong-arm their record company to give them a higher royalty rate. These idiots are having a direct effect on ordinary people. That’s fucked-up. Why are the governments not doing anything about this? Our jobs in the music industry are as important as a postman or policeman or anyone else, ’cos we all contribute to the economy. The creative industries are under direct attack.”
Besides, the individual artists or bands aren’t always the only ones affected. The backroom songwriters who earn a living from having their songs covered by a multitude of artists don’t necessarily have ‘fans’, but liberties are being taken with their work too, which mean that they don’t get paid. Glib answers which suggest that the artists and bands will get the lost revenues back in ticket and merchandising sales don’t hold water either, given the complexity of the issues involved.
One thing is for sure. No matter how hard the music industry works to cut down on illegal file sharing, the hackers will always be ten steps ahead, and so far nobody’s come up with a satisfactory legitimate business model – though the latest figures suggest that change is afoot. A survey conducted in mid-July by the British consultancy firm MusicAlly revealed that the number of unlicensed file-sharers, as a proportion of the total population, had fallen from 22 percent in December 2007, when the survey was last conducted, to 17 percent. The biggest drop was recorded in the 14-18-year-old age bracket: 26 percent said they shared files once a month, compared to 42 per cent in the earlier survey.
Dick Doyle: “There’s the monthly subscription a la carte unfettered downloads etc. There’s the paid-for download service that we all know – iTunes probably still have 70 or 80% of the market worldwide. There’s the ad-supported service which is free to consumers but somebody else is paying for it, that doesn’t seem to be working as effectively as people thought. There are different business models, and a few more which will surface, just none that seem to have grabbed the imagination of the public.”
That said, the emergence of Spotify – a streaming service supported by ads, which also offers a paid-for ad-less premium service – suggests that people are willing to stump up for the availability of music in digital form. While it hasn’t been licensed for Ireland, the service claims to have 2 million users in the UK.
“The greatest problem,” Dick Doyle says, “is when people are getting it for free it’s very hard to compete with that. Despite the fact that people could have paid what they liked for the Radiohead album legally, the vast majority still went for the illegal service.”

The Pirate Bay case opens up a squirmy can of not just financial but also philosophical worms. Yes, it’s undeniable that the big labels fleeced consumers for years with inflated prices and innovations designed to sell us the same back catalogue we’d already bought ten years before. And yes, it’s true too that many of the leaks the industry bemoaned so loudly emerged from the ranks of its own personnel. But the music industry is not just made up of behemoths. There are also independent labels, retailers, publicists, journalists, and of course, the artists themselves.
Besides, it’s not all about the benjamins. There’s also an argument to be made that piracy stems from attitudes about the devaluation of art, the notion that, if something is not deemed essential, it’s monetarily worthless, that if you can get an album or e-book or movie for free then good luck to you and to hell with the folks who put their sweat and blood into creating it.
The counter-view is that art is the furthest thing from inessential. It’s the most fundamental evidence we have of the same freedom of speech that piracy advocates exploit to justify their ideologies.
Dick Doyle: “I think one of the greatest difficulties we have is people still can’t see the difference between stealing in a shop and stealing through a file-sharing system. In most cases the people in file-sharing are more serious as far as the industry is concerned, because they’re distributing as well as using, to use your analogy of the drug trade. These people are destroying an industry that’s lost about five or six billion in trade worldwide. In Ireland it’s down 30 or 40 million euro in five years, and those five years were when consumer spending was at an all-time high. It’s unbelievable. But the culture is the thing we need to change.”
There is an upside. The last decade of digital revolutions has produced musicians who are arguably more music-literate, self-sufficient, business-savvy, innovative and imaginative than the last two put together.
Stephen Anderson: “The one thing that inspires me is I attended a convention here in Belfast about three weeks ago, and the saving grace, if it’s not too late, is there’s a new generation of young people who are very excited about their ideas and their plans, and are very heavily motivated to continue with developing the music industry and wanting to have full time careers in it. Now that’s a really good positive spirit, and I think it’s incumbent upon those within the music business to tap into that now.
“In the end the kindest thing we can all do is slay the beast, put it out of its misery, kill the music industry, and let’s get back to the business of music. It’s beyond crisis point. There’s a common denominator here. Do we love this business or do we not? And if we do, let’s make it workable and hand on the legacy to the next generation, because there are really good, brilliant people coming up and they deserve to be given something that can work.”
Calvin Harris takes a different view. “There’s a whole generation of people who have grown up thinking that they’re entitled to music for free. I don’t think it’s their fault at all. I think it’s part of the culture. The US is properly clamping down on it, sending people legal notices compared to the UK; in the UK it’s almost like they’re sitting back. But there are quite obvious things that can be done to stop it – and they’re not being done.”