Contemplations Contemplatin' Since 2008

Downloading Music

To pirate or not to pirate that is the question. Some might say my definition of piracy is confused with what I'm actually trying to say. I take the definition of piracy as the following:

"Copyright infringement (or copyright violation) is the unauthorized use of material that is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works." - Taken from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_(media)

"pirate - copy illegally; of published material" - Taken from wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

So in short, my definition of piracy is someone who downloads, or effectively steals an artists music, so for instance, downloading or copying and then listening to music that they have not paid for. Thus the artist not gaining any money from a sale of a CD or DVD so to speak. Whilst many might disagree with my definitions, I'd like to point out that no matter what term I use, I personally refer to piracy, as the illegal acquisition and possible re-distribution of music or associate media, such as DVD's. We will focus on CD media, namely those produced by bands, or by the record company who represent them so to speak.

So, without further a due, I'd like to make clear my stance on this subject, as it's come up in conversation rather a lot recently with people whom I deeply respect and admire each in their own way. I feel though, that although our opinions may differ, each opinion warrants it's own merits, and so should be taken in that light. I'm happy for anyone to reply to this post with their personal opinions on downloading music, the effect that you think it has on the music industry, and namely the artist. I'd also like it if people could comment with why they feel piracy is good for the music industry, or why you feel it benefits the music industry so to speak.

I have to say, I have had very long in depth conversations with close friends of mine, who feel that piracy does benefit the music industry. I do (in part) agree with them, as any kind of music downloading, ultimately means that the downloader enjoys or likes the music enough to download it in the first place, or simply wants to diversify music wise. Whilst this makes a lot of sense for those who download music on occasion to try out new music rather than those who chronically download day & night, music which they will probably never even listen too, let alone see deep within the folders of their 10 terrabyte hard drive array! Those that download the music with good intentions, for example to diversify their music tastes, and see whether they enjoy a particurlar band is good in itself. The reason I see this as a good thing, is outlined below with bullet point:

• It means that the downloader gets to experience and hear music that they haven't heard before. Or they haven't had access to previously.
• This means that in turn, they either buy the CD (profiting the artist), or they at the very least maybe go to a gig. The prices of gigs are definitely ranging and the costs of venue's / travelling expenses must take a big chunk out of the profit they make from the money that the tour provides. Also, from personal experience I've found that different bands have very different prices on their tours, for instance, Spandau Ballet have a ticket price of £60.00 for a standing ticket to Sheffield Arena. (As of 05/10/2009). And in contrast a band such as GreenDay at the same venue costs £35.00 also for a standing ticket, also as of (05/10/2009). Other venues can range from as low as £10.00, depending on the artist and the venue respectively. So clearly you can see the band playing dictates a different price. A benefit from downloading maybe, but how much money are the bands actually making out of this? (Factoring in venue costs, travelling costs, other expenses such as hotels, employees who maintain their instruments etc. etc.)
• People are able to be more broad with their music searches, for example they can type into Google : "What are the best bands with in the Trance Genre?", Google would then come back with a lot of different bands, and the person could then go search for each one there, until there heart is content. Finding new music. Some might say if downloading illegally wasn't so easy, bands wouldn't be able to benefit as much, I would have agreed with them a few years ago. Although there are new alternatives which mean that music can be listened to and downloaded for free (but legally) or for a small price (still legal). I will explore these alternatives later, explaining why I think they are good alternatives, and also explaining the negatives to these alternatives. Just to give a balanced view.
• People can share music with their friends, for instance, Jimmy says to John, "I've found some awesome music just lately, would you like me to send it to you?", John says, "Yes, please!". That instantly introduces someone to music who wouldn't have come across it otherwise, or come across it as easily so to speak. With the ever decreasing amounts of music on MTV for instance, one can see why people would want to find alternatives to getting new music, or simply exploring new music!

Now, let's explore the negatives of downloading music illegally (whilst this isn't an exhaustive list, I'm putting it together from my own experiences, and experiences that I have read from other people):

• Downloading through the likes of Bittorrent or Kazaa (e.g. Gnutella networks) Limewire, etc. Whilst Bittorrent on it's own is separate to the likes of Gnutella networks, it isn't on it's own a bad application, nor is it illegal to use, it's purely based on the content that you download as to whether it's illegal or not. When downloading using some of the sources stated above this is based on P2P technology, so basically a client PC (e.g. yours) will connect to many other PC's on the internet, (e.g. Tom's, Harry's, Julia's) to fetch a part of the file from each to make up the full file. This has it's benefits, but whilst it has it's benefits, often people use this technology to exploit things for their own benefit. This is where viruses/malware/and all together fake files come in. You'll often find (from an IT Support POV) that users who use Limewire will often have PC's rife with viruses and malware. This isn't because of the music, it's because people either tie something in with the music download, or you get tricked into downloading something you think is Elton John's latest concert, or Metallica's latest album, then it either turns out to be hardcore porn, or simply some random program that when you try to run appears to do nothing, but in the background gradually starts to wreak havoc (yes in my younger days, I myself was caught out by this!). Whilst a lot of this can be prevented by good anti-virus / anti-malware, often people don't have the know-how to prevent such things from occuring, thus it causes long term problems for them, and can often mean that you're secretly transferring passwords, bank account information, or other private stuff (in the case of keyloggers / remote administration tools (for those unlucky enough to not be behind a suitable firewall)). Luckily, these days, most decent ISP's offer up a free router to help prevent attack / infection, however that can be circumvented. Also, Microsoft has got an excellent firewall built in to the likes of XP, Vista and the new Windows 7. So things like this are gradually becoming a thing of the past.
• Sometimes, Music you download, may be of very low quality, or may be missing parts. I found on one occasion when I downloaded an entire album that at the end of every track there was distinct white noise played for around 5 seconds. Whilst this is very annoying, it is also potentially damaging to your hi-fi / computer speakers at high-levels, as it can take out your tweeters quicker than you can say boo!
• The music you download may be mis-labelled, so you may end up getting something different to what you want, or something by the same band, but duplicates of the same song, or something like that. Once again this has happened to me in the past.
• You may also find that you get bootlegs of a concert, so this is bad quality for a start, as it's usually recorded on a mobile phone or mp3 player with a microphone, this can be damaging to the bands reputation, as a person might start listening and think it sounds like utter crap. Either down to the quality of the recording, the quality of the band's live performance, or BOTH!
• You could be put in prison, or fined a massive amount - http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_7020000/newsid_7029300/7029305.stm

Whilst by no means the list above is exhaustive, it simply highlights some of the dangers in downloading music illegally, along with the fact that it can be very annoying and frustrating if you run into some of the problems highlighted above.

I'm sure there are other benefits to illegally downloading music - I ask anyone who reads this to happily comment and I will take it into account with the rest of my post. Now, before I go on, I will point out that I may have more in favour of legally obtaining music, the only real reason for that, is simply because I have explored a lot of the legal alternatives, and I use them myself. I'm trying to be fair to both sides of the argument, and remain as neutral as possible.

To explore some of the legal music alternatives, I will be naming a few, providing links to websites, as well as my own personal opinion on them (if I have one). I haven't posted links to any of the sites mentioned above on the illegal section, as they can pose a risk to your PC, however Kazaa has gone legal (or is attempting) to go legal, so that should shortly no longer be a problem (if it is in fact still a problem).

I'd like to start by talking about Napster, a once illegal P2P client filesharing program, which I used myself back in the day. This was developed by Shawn Fanning while he was attending Northeastern University in Boston, Masachusetts, USA. Napster was one of the pioneering p2p applications, which enabled users all around the world (decent internet connection, permitting) to be able to transfer music amongst various other forms of media and software between themselves and other Napster users across the world. This was originally developed by Fanning in an attempt to replace more techie alternatives such as using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) as this is generally quite difficult to use, and requires someone with a technical background to understand how it works. Napster grew to provide a user-friendly way of searching for and downloading music. With the popularity of Napster growing, the ease of which you could find older, more rare tracks was becoming easier, along with being able to obtain digital copies of music you may have already owned on Vinyl, or a Casette Tape, before Compact Disc became the normal and mainstream way of pressing and selling music. A lot of the early adopters of Napster justified their use of downloading music, by stating that they were downloading music they already owned on Vinyl or Casette. This led to a bit of a legal grey area so to speak. Other people simply used Napster to obtain music for free regardless of whether they owned it on another format or not. Please see this link for more information on Napster's progression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster - Numerous artists such as Metallica, Dr.Dre, and Madonna all realised that their music was being illegally shared on Napster and filed lawsuits against Napter, some of them providing usernames of Napster users who they believed to be illegally re-distributing their music. They realised this in part because some of their tracks were leaked to radio stations before they were even released by the artist. Eventually, to cut a long story short, Napster has a lawsuit filed against it by the RIAA (Recording Industry Associaton of America) on December the 7th, 1999, over the years after that Napster gained even more notoriety from the media exposure it was receiving. Napster is now a legal music service offering a free client to listen to 30 second samples of tracks, or you can pay £9.99 for unlimited downloads to your PC (DRM protected), meaning that for one, the Napster software needs to run under Windows, as DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a part of Windows Media Player in Windows. If you wish to put the tracks you download on a DRM Compatible MP3 Player, you can then pay an extra £5 - £14.99 to get this option. Overall, my personal experience with Napster has been a good one, right from it's start, through to it's now legal music downloading service. You can also share your playlists on Napster with other friends using Napster. I had on occasion got viruses through it though when downloading music or software, so this is one of the negative points raised above. However, since becoming legal, Napster is clean of viruses, and has provided a very secure, enjoyable service. Since becoming legal, Napster no longer uses a peer to peer system. http://www.napster.com/ -- You can try Napster for free for 7 days --

Another alternative to illegal downloads, is a relatively new application in the scheme of things, "Spotify". http://www.spotify.com/ - I've found Spotify to be even better than Napster personally, the reasons I say this, is because there is both a Windows client, and a Mac client. There is also information readily available on their website on how to install it under Linux with Wine. The reason this is possible, is because Spotify does not rely on DRM to be able to play it's tracks. You can cache tracks for offline usage with Spotify, but it's sorted into a complex split of files that is difficult to put together into listenable tracks (unless of course you have the correct software to do this), so you are forced to play these tracks back within the Spotify player. I've found right from the beginning Spotify to be very easy to use, and also extremely quick. Part of the reason why Spotify is so quick, is because it caches the tracks on your hard disk (you can specify how much space to use for the cache), another reason is that it uses a P2P system, so you effectively fetch parts of the music file from multiple users also using Spotify. This makes it very, very quick to use, and literally has almost no buffer times (on most occasions). How secure Spotify's use of Peer-to-Peer is, I'm not sure, but for argument's sake, we will assume that any potential risks have been assessed by external bodies, as well as Spotify's tech guys to ensure secure usage of their product at all times. Spotify started off by being invite only, then went to free for anyone who wished to sign up. It's recently got back to invite only (but only for a short period of time if I understand correctly) - as recently they have released a mobile application for the IPhone and the Android range of phones, so it's meant that it's attracted a lot of attention from people, and their servers are starting to struggle from the load, so they're having to sort that out before putting it back to a 'free for all' so to speak. Whilst you can listen to an unlimited amount of music on the free version of Spotify (you do get adverts every 20 minutes or so),  (you also can't do offline caching with the free version), you can pay £9.99 a month for the premium version of Spotify, allowing you to gain first views on newly released albums, along with the opportunity to use the mobile application. Another benefit of using the premium version of Spotify is that you can up the bitrate of the songs to 320kbps with the Ogg Vorbis a5 codec, as opposed to the 160kbps with the same codec, so you're doubling the bitrate for better quality. Although, I'm using a decent hi-fi setup on my PC, and I can't tell -that- much of a difference. So the average user will struggle to find any difference between the two. With Spotify, you can also share playlists with friends who use Spotify too, making it easier to show your friend some of the music you really enjoy listening too. Those with premium accounts can send out invites to their friends & family to attract more people to Spotify, although once the free version comes fully back into effect, this will simply be a way to notify a person rather than giving them the opportunity to use something they couldn't have used otherwise. I believe Spotify to be the best at legal music sharing in this day & age, or should I say, legal music listening / downloading (as you can cache the music).

Another decent (web browser based) listening service is http://www.we7.com/ - I haven't had much experience with this myself, but from what I've seen with family members using it, it's very good indeed, easy to use, and you just have to listen to an advert every now and again. This is to help bring in the revenue for both themselves and to pay the royalties to the bands / record companies.

I've also found http://www.last.fm/ to be a very good service to use when wanting to find new music. It enables you to legally listen to music through it's software client, and also through the website. You can do this by finding an artist you already like, then ask it to play music from the same genre or of a similar style. This way you can find out other music you like. You can also have many friends on last.fm, of which you can see your musical compatibility with, this helps to show what artists you both like, and also those that you don't share in common. This often leads people (including myself) to go searching through their friends library to see what other music they're playing that you haven't heard of. I find this to be very enlightening! Another plus with last.fm is that it has plugins (native and also separately developed by other people) that you can use with Windows Media Player, Napster, Spotify etc.. that scrobbles (sends a record) of the music you listen to, to last.fm's servers, so that your friends can see what you've been listening too. It also collates the information, and tells you what your most popular artist is, sortable by days, months, etc. I personally find the social aspect of this to be very good, as it means you can invoke conversation with people about things you otherwise wouldn't have thought of. It gives people something to talk about. I believe this to be very useful, and I use it on a daily basis.

Apple Itunes is a favourite amongst many people - it's not one I have used much, so can't really comment too much on it. I will say though, it's a good way to download music (cheaply) as a track costs on average 79p.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of free alternatives, or cheap alternatives. As there are so many new music services popping up everyday, to name a few, the likes of Linn are diversifying to offer a wide range of music, along with other hi-fi companies. There are many other alternatives such as:

• Deezer
• The Hype Machine
• Songza
• Imeem

Whilst I stress the list above is not exhaustive, these are also very differing in the way they work, and what they provide. So there is a lot out there for those with a diverse taste!

Now for the Pro's and Cons of legal music downloading / listening:

Pros:

• You're supporting artists with Ad-Revenue through sites such as last.fm / spotify / napster. http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Earn-Advertising-Revenue-With-Your-Website&id=89197
• You're respecting how a lot of artists wish their music to be listened too.
• You're supporting artists by small subscription fees (£9.99 - a night's beer money?)
• You're introducing friends to music legally.
• It's legal.
• You're not likely to catch a virus or any type of malware through proper regulated legal services.
• The tracks are of good quality.
• They are not bootlegs (so half complete, recorded by mobile phone, or anything like that).
• You're not profiting money hungry criminals, to profit human trafficking, drug trafficking, etc.
• The source is reliable, it's of good quality, and it's valid.
• You don't risk being a victim of other criminal activities such as Identity theft, and keyloggers/trojans (comes under the umbrella of viruses).
• The applications / web browser alternatives are becoming more and more user friendly. They are also very quick.
• Spotify for one allows you to install it on as many computers as you want. And listen anywhere effectively. This has become easier with the new mobile application.
• You can 'share' tracks with your friends through most of the new music services.
• You don't risk being put in prison or having your internet connection suspended. (It does happen.) - http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_7020000/newsid_7029300/7029305.stm

The above is not an extensive list of the Pro's, however it serves it's purpose.

Cons:

• Sometimes music you want, isn't on the free sites, due to licencing issues, or the artist not wanting it there at all.
• Sometimes the interface of the particurlar site or application you're using is cumbersome, or not very user-friendly.
• Some people don't like to pay any money for something.
• You can't easily put music on your MP3 player unless you have a paid for subscription from select music services.
• You can't transport music between computers easily, if at all (sometimes).
• You can't simply send your friend a track on MSN, or through AOL IM for instance.
• Once you stop paying for some of the applications, you can no longer listen to the music you once downloaded, or 'cached'.

Please note that most of the services I have mentioned on here, are either limited to the UK, or sometimes both the UK and the US. Although the US does have a lot of it's own free music services, such as Rhapsody (very similar to Napster), http://www.slacker.com/ , and Pandora. Just to name a few.

In conclusion, my personal opinion is that there are plenty of free alternatives to illegal downloading, and the more people embrace them. The more they will become popular, and the more your favourite artist will end up getting paid for what they love doing best.

Please feel free to comment on this post, as I'd love to hear your opinions, and your views on the matter. To those out there who I've already had this discussion with (you know who you are), I respect your opinions, and find them very informative. It's inspired me to write this post, and I hope you can find the time to comment.

- Cheers!