Music Piracy

Running Head: MUSIC PIRACY, AN ENTIRE INDUSTRY DIMINISHED

Music Piracy: An Entire Industry Diminished

Jahmal Parker

English 135

DeVry University

6-14-2010

Music Piracy

The dynamics of the music industry have definitely changed over the years. Do you remember when Michael Jackson released “Thriller” and sold over 50 million records? Well, those heroic days are long gone due to a new digital hole in the music industry business model and if we don’t think of a new model to implement there will be even fewer artists. So much emphasis is placed on innovation but sometimes you have to renovate, go backwards and start from the basics in order in progress. Despite the harsh economic realities in the world today, many still believe the internet is widely responsible for what’s going on with the decline in the music industry. Efforts have been made to resolve the issues and possibly restore the music business once and for all, but they may or may not be enough. As a result of music piracy through the internet and file sharing sites, the music industry is in a very vulnerable position and the only way I see to restore it is to cut consumer’s broadband connection when downloading illegal music.

You may wonder how we all got to this point in the first place. Piracy was a minor problem for the music industry until the arrival of the compact tape cassette in the late 1960’s, the wide-spread availability of home cassette recorders in the 1970’s, and later the advent of the CD in 1982 with each event developing the foundation for fans to steal music (Janssens, J., Vandaele, S., & Beken, T., 2009). Although the CD format boosted global music sales, the technology enabled master-quality copying in large quantities, and the development of encoding formats such as MP3 allowed users to easily transfer. These changes made physical piracy possible, but they barely hurt record sales because fans could identify the difference between the “bootleg” physical CD and the...