The Impacts of Illegal Download for Musicians

The Impacts of Illegal Download for Musicians

Do you download songs from iTunes or other authorized services to download songs? If you do, then you are one of the people who download songs legally. The fact is that, according to Google Trends, the number of the word “free mp3 download” that people search on Google has been increasing since 2005. This indicates that there are a lot of people getting songs without paying for them. Today, internet allows people to easily download songs illegally.

This leads to reluctance among musicians to make a living out of music. According to a study done by International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which is an organization that represents the interest of 1.300 record companies from all over the world, since the launch of Napster, the first file sharing service in 1999, the sources of unauthorized music to download for free from the internet have multiplied. Today, the internet provides websites, such as 4shared.com and filestube.

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com, which make it even easier for people to get music for free. As a result, a lot of people can download or share music illegally.

In debate.org, which is an online debate website that gives a platform for its users to discuss whether they agree or disagree on controversial subjects, 74% people agrees that music should be free. This shows that a lot of people actually download music without paying for it. People who download music illegally may not realize how their action affects musicians. When people download music from unauthorized services and websites, musicians are actually at risk of losing profits of their songs.

Some of the people who agree that music should be free argue that musicians would not lose much profit because they also make money from ticket concerts and merchandise sales. However, these people might not aware that profits from a song are not only for the musician, but also for other people who works behind the music, such as producers, songwriters, engineers, technicians, and marketing.

For that reason, if people keep downloading songs without paying for it, musicians will not gain much profit from their songs Because there is a possibility that musicians cannot gain much profits for their works, musicians might lose interest in producing music. The example of a musician who loses interest in producing music because of illegal download is Lily Allen. Lily Allen is an English singer is famous for her single, “Smile”. In 2009, wrote in her blog that she was fed up with illegal downloading, so she decided not to renegotiate her record contract, and she also wrote that she has no plans to make another record (Swash, 2009). For a lot of musicians, music is their main source of income, so money can be musicians' motivation to keep making new music. Therefore, if musicians cannot gain much profit for their works, not only they will lose interest in making music, it might as well end their career as a musician. A lot of people try to pursue professional music production as their full-time career.

One of the examples is by being an indie artist. By being an indie artist, there is a possibility that a musician can earn as much money as major label's artists. Foster the People and Lana Del Rey, for example. However, being an indie artist is not as easy as it may seem. Carla Acheson, a manager of the independent music label Melodrift Productions, says in her article that financial burden of indie artists' music production is on the artists themselves, so if they do not gain profits from CD sales or gigs, they might actually give up music (2010). Another example is the fact that there are thousands of people who show up to audition for singing competitions, such as American Idol. When you watch these competitions on TV, you would see that the contenders' motivation of entering the competition are often to change their life for the better, which also often means to make their economy condition better. For example, Angela Martin, a contender of American Idol season 7, explains that the reason she auditions for American Idol is because of her daughter's medical condition (Bell, 2010 p.159). She hopes that by participating in the competition she could make money for her daughter's medical treatment that she cannot afford on her own (p. 159).

From these example we can see that gaining profits is one of the reason why people are interested in pursuing musical career However, because of the fact that even some of professional musicians are ending their career due to the fact that they cannot gain much profit because of illegal downloading, people's interest in pursuing musical career may also decrease. Illegal downloading impacts people's desire of pursuing music as a full-time career. However, there are actually many ways that people can do to earn money from music without worrying how much profit would they lose. One of them is by uploading song covers on YouTube. People can actually earn money from the videos they uploaded if the videos reach a certain number of viewers. It might seem that covering other artist's song and upload it on YouTube is as violating copyrights as illegal downloading, but song covers are actually legal. According to YouTube’s, as long as users give credit to the copyright owner in their video, uploading song covers video is not violating copyrights.