Music Piracy

In the future, the only way musicians will make money is by playing live. New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also "alternatives" to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

When record companies appeared, services they were providing were necessary in order for people to listen to recorded music, making and selling records was a major undertaking. This was a starting point of development of recording techniques and record studios, at that time making recorded music available to masses required a significant capital and investments, which in turn required a legal structure that would provide stable profits and return on the required investment. Music industry used to provide people with tools that were essential to listen to recorder music and the difference between that time and our days is that record companies charge people for permission to use tools people already have that they did not provide, that in fact people paid someone else for, yet the legal structure that developed during the time when that services were useful remains. The legal structure says if you don't pay you are breaking the law therefore you are criminal and the reason it has not been changed is because of "STARS" the entire structure of the record industry is built around their interests. Records produce good money for the industry and almost nothing goes to the pocket of musician.

Here is the Diagram of the Music Production Chain (taken from http://www.soc.duke.edu/~s142tm01/chain2.html)

This particular diagram is a good example of old model of music production chain, In our days there is no need of Publisher, Distributors and in most cases manufacturers, modern technology allows to burn CDs at home publish own records using internet distributing the material across the World Wide Web physically and digitally.

In old days, musician had to pay to almost every person in Music Production chain to

Record studios, engineers, managers, labels, publishers, legal departments, distribution networks etc. in fact all of the departments and services belong to the same corporation and the record companies are not actually record companies at all.

"To begin with, we should note that the major "record companies" are not actually record companies at all but huge media conglomerates. Most "independent" labels are owned by a corporate label. Each "major" is in turn owned by an even bigger corporation, and so on up the food chain. At the top of the chain sit a tiny handful of media giants: Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, Viacom (formerly CBS) and General Electric. These corporations are among the world's largest. All are listed in Fortune Magazine's "Global 500" largest corporations in the world. They have integrated both horizontally (owning lots of record labels, lots of newspapers, and radio stations) and vertically (controlling newspapers, magazines, book publishing houses, and movie and TV production studios, as well as print distribution systems, cable and broadcast TV networks, radio stations, telephone lines, satellite systems, web portals, billboards, and more)."

In contemporary world there are very few recording projects that actually require use of the Cutting-edge technology studios. The Internet and World Wide Web have changed the character of music distribution with laptops and desktop PCs loaded with hardware and software necessary for high-quality sound recording. All the hardware and software applications are available for the average class people not mentioning internet piracy and "cracked" software that is available to download using peer-to-peer applications.

The problem of piracy has been rising for the past 10 years, and the numbers of "pirates" are growing day by day. From my personal experience every person that is using computer came across piracy and became victims or even the pirates themselves and the reason for that is simple, easy and user friendly peer-to-peer software takes only couple of minutes to setup and another minute to become familiar with interface and all the features, in another 10 minutes it is possible to find your favorite artist and download your favorite album. That is in fact so convenient that it is becoming only the question of conscience whether it is a problem or an opportunity to become pirate.

Realizing the problem of piracy Sony tried innovative approach to earn money on digital music, In 2000 Sony launched online music store "the Store" where the price