Music industry can hit the right notes

WE are all getting into the fun of downloading, whether it’s music, films, TV shows, it’s just a great way to fill up your iPod.

As the craze grows, however, the big problem for the industry is the threat of piracy.

But what exactly does this mean to the various industries?

Let’s take the music industry. We all know the music industry has taken a huge hit, with major shops like HMV closing down.

For nearly a decade the US music industry has seen a decline in sales of CDs and all this time it has put the blame on digital piracy. By doing so, the labels conveniently ignore the most drastic format shift music has ever seen — the digital revolution.

With the growing popularity of the internet, computers and, most importantly MP3-players, music fans have started to trade in their CDs for MP3s and other digital files. Initially, the public had to convert CDs themselves, but in 2003 the iTunes store opened.

With the introduction of paid downloads, consumers no longer had to buy a full album if they were only interested in two or three songs.

Copying music is easy and the risk of getting caught minimal, and this is unlikely to change. But easy piracy does not mean the death of creativity in music.

Hollywood has fared better. Hollywood worries a lot about piracy but while there is plenty of it, it has yet to threaten the existence of the major film studios.

Why has the movie industry’s fate been different? For one, technology gave them a few years’ reprieve. Video files are much larger than music files. As a result they were, until recently, relatively difficult to download and upload. Hollywood fought copying, but only as part of a broader overall strategy aimed at capitalising on the opportunities the internet offered, while blunting the effect of piracy.

So what’s the difference?

Well as I am sitting here looking at iTunes, I’m realising, without it, we’d all be illegally downloading.

Today, copying is a fact of life in the music world.

Still, the music industry can change further to better survive a world of easy copying; rely more on the live show, an experience that cannot be copied; attempt to woo customers away from piracy by emphasising the quality of the legitimate product; create (or strengthen) social norms about copying; and diversify the ways in which consumers can access music. The result will be a very different music industry. But it will be a world with a lot of great music.