Music Piracy

Music piracy is the process of copying, or file sharing copyrighted materials illegally. Music theft hurts the artists that bring music to your ears due to the fact that they’re not receiving a decent amount of income because their songs are obviously getting stolen. A survey has identified that 70 percent of all 18 to 29 year olds have pirated music, TV shows, or movies. Another poll found that 46 percent of all Americans have engaged in piracy (Anderson). Back in the 1980s, music piracy was slightly spotted, when people created things called mixed tapes, however making these did not cost the industry much money. Cases of music piracy highly increased after the compact disc (CD) was created in 1982. One major case of music piracy was affiliated with the heavy metal band Metallica on April 13, 2000. Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster due to many copyright infringements, and racketeering. The heavy metal band found $10 million worth of damages which is roughly $100,000 per downloaded song. NetPD evaluated Napster’s illegal program, and produced a list of 335,435 users that were downloading and sharing the band’s albums.

Music piracy first became an issue when cassette tapes were created. Statistics showed that piracy highly increased after the compact disc was released. A lot of individuals used the old program created by the company that Metallica sued, called Napster. Napster was a free downloadable program where users could download tracks by artists that was completely free, and over 4 million people took advantage of this computer application, which means a lot of bands other than Metallica were losing money that they’ve worked for. However, many non-popular bands enjoyed, and actually allowed their music to get pira...

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...ng-term cost of hurting the artists they most admire, and new talent” (Aksomitis). In the United States, roughly 76.2 million songs were stolen off the internet illegally. This number grew by 89% in 2006 where 144 million songs were stolen. However, in Japan only 1.1 million songs were stolen. Apparently, music piracy is only an issue in the United States.

Works Cited

"Anti Piracy." RIAA. N.p.. Web. 13 Nov 2013. .

Isenberg, Doug. World Book Online. N.p.. Web. 13 Nov 2013. .

Aksomitis, Linda. Downloading Music. Farmington, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2007. Print.

Anderson, Nate. "It's Official: America a land of young, casual pirates." Ars Technica. N.p., 16 Nov 2011. Web. 14 Nov 2013. .