Music Piracy Study

Music Piracy of the Current Age

It is hard to run a company when an estimated 95% of online sales are stolen and the company is facing a $3.7 billion revenue loss annually(Sheehan 1). Music piracy is the major downside of Internet to the music industry because people can do a simple search and find a copy of an album or song that they like for free. The Internet has renovated the way that people have access to upcoming music. Musicians can now market their music internationally with ease and communication between record labels/managers and the musicians are more timely and propositions can come with ease, but this does not mean that the internet has not caused problems for the music industry. The music industry has to make a decision to work along with piracy or attempt to shut down music piracy by prosecuting sites and uploaders. By understanding the effectiveness of laws and consumers reasons behind piracy, the music industry should cooperate and adjust the industry to work beside piracy.

Over 10,000 domain names are present on the Internet that host pirated materials with over 5,000 different IP addresses ( Lauinger ). Copyright laws do not allow the government to shut down all of these websites, so the only way to prevent piracy is to go through these uploading sites and search for illegal material. Even when the government manages to shut down a public sharing site, such as Megaupload in 2010, a dramatic shift occurs to other uploading sites in search of the same content ( Lauinger ). This proves that no matter if one site gets shut down people will not hesitate to continue searching for specific pirated material that they are looking for. In another attempt of stopping piracy, The RIAA attempted to scare the public by prosecuting and charging pirates millions of dollars in court including victims such as single mothers, a dead person, and a 13 year old girl ( Wallace ). Even though the cost of pirating could cost a person millions of dollars, the...