Yesterday I was walking around Umeda in the underground in the ekimae building area. I the basements of those buildings there are some used record stores. They actually have a lot of good stuff, but a little pricey. Records are sold at their value. I guess I’m just used to the days of going to Jelly’s and picking up records at a great bargain. Going to these records store, raised a question. What is the difference between downloading an mp3 and buying a used record/cd/tape?
If you buy a record from a used CD store, you are giving your money to the store. It’s not going to the artist because it was already purchased once. The used music market profits off of artists, but the artists don’t profit off it. All profit from a used album, belongs to the store.
Now what about downloading an MP3? If you buy it from an online digital music store, the artists gets some sort of money from it. If you download it through other means, then the artist is not getting anything. This is the part it gets fuzzy for me. I’m in no way advocating digital music piracy, but if you follow the logic, of the physical used music market, both are not contributing anything to the artist. That leaves the question what is the difference? Actually to me it sounds like buying used music is worse than downloading it. The main reason is that money going to the second purchase is going to someone other than the artist.
So now in this argument we are at a point where it appears the used physical music market sounds like more of a detriment to the artist. Is that really the case? Some questions about digital music piracy needs to be addressed before we can make a decision on which is worse for the artist. Is there money in digital music piracy? Are these pirate groups and individual profiting from it? Off hand I would say no. I have never heard of anyone making money off it. There is money in illegal physical duplication of music. It is probably the case that majority of the music in that arena is downloaded illegally. Although it’s a valid argument to use, I am ignoring it because it would require us to look in to black market economics.
The next question I have is, where does the music online come from. Do these groups acquire the product legally to begin with? Some probably do and some probably don’t. If they do acquire it legally, the artist is getting paid. If they stole it, physically stole the album, then the loss would be relegated to the normal loss of sales due to theft. This is another tricky point. Here’s a scenario I thought about. What if someone stole a CD from a music store. Then he made copies of the CD for his friends, and they in turn made copies for their friends, and so on. Does this sound familiar? It should, it is the same principle as peer to peer sharing and it is also the way file music sharing worked before everyone started having an internet connection. In this physical copying case the winner would be the bland CD-R manufactures. They are profiting off the artists music in this scenario. Now what if the person who stole the CD decided to sell it to a used CD store after making copies for friends and personal use? Now he is gaining from the artist and as previously stated the reseller of used music is profiting from someone else’s creativity.
As I have read previously, in some article about music piracy (I read a ton of thing on digital music marketing and such), downloads of music need to be accepted as another avenue of loss. In the end it really comes down to the person. Some people will always download music, some will download some music and purchase some music, and some will just purchase and never download. Then there is the last category, although rare, some people will never buy or illegally download music. These people would be the ones content on listening to radio/ internet radio and just downloading free legal MP3s.