Do you steal music?

(This was originally written in September 2008)

A couple of weeks ago I got in arguments with several different people about music piracy. Then I found the "Make music downloading legal in Canada again!" Facebook group. All the usual arguments (music industry evil, musicians rich, no actual lost income, I go to concerts, I need to sample it before I buy) came up. They hold no more weight now than they did seven or eight years ago when this issue returned to prominence (it was a bit of a heated debate in the 70s after the rise of the cassette). I've been trying to think of why I take so much personal offence and feel so incredibly angry and indignant when the topic comes up.

It's not really the "I'm a musician, I sympathize" thing, though that contributes. Really, I'm in a band that's played ~40 shows and sold ~100-~150 CDs. I don't really have the same perspective as a mainstream artist.

I think it's the feeling that the only reason the vast majority of people behave ethically is that they're scared of getting caught. I find that thought depressing. However, I’m going to go through the motions and talk about most of the common pro-piracy arguments anyway.

The silliest argument, and the one I’ll address first, is that ‘musicians are rich and don’t need the money’. There are a few major fallacies implicit in this argument. The most egregiously wrong idea is that you have the right to steal from people with more money than you. That's a slippery slope I'm sure we don't want to go down (you're reading this on a computer? In Canada? At least half the population of the world have the right to steal from you). There are two others: Musicians are rich, and musicians are the only ones who benefit from album sales.

Most musicians aren't rich. I have a hard time believing Owen Pallett is driving around in a Rolls-Royce with four boys hanging off his arms, eating caviar at high-class restaurants. If you have a mainstream hit on top-40 radio and a video playing round-the-clock on MTV, you're probably doing pretty alright for yourself. Most musicians don't fall into this category.

There is a whole industry that benefits from album sales. There are artists who design the CD liner notes, the people who run the companies that press discs, the people who run the distribution warehouse that make sure those discs get to the stores, the guy who runs the little record shop downtown and the kid who works for the guy who runs the record shop downtown. All of their livelihoods depend on CD sales too, and when you download an album, you're stealing from your buddy who works at the record store and your buddy who's trying to make a living as a visual artist as much as you're stealing from the "fat-cat executive" and the rich musician.

Another argument I've heard more recently is that someone downloads an album to "sample" it, and if he likes it enough, he’ll go out and buy the album. Again, this argument has a few inherent flaws. Go in to a restaurant. Sit down. Order a meal. Eat the meal. If it wasn't one of the best meals you've ever had, get up and leave. Don't pay. If the waiter tries to stop you, tell him you just wanted to see what the food was like, and it was pretty good but you don't think you want to spend $15 on it. I don’t think you will get far.

This argument is also moot because almost every band out there now puts a pretty significant portion of their new albums on their Myspace or iTunes pages so people can 100% legally and with the artist's explicit consent sample their new albums. Mogwai's entire new album, The Hawk Is Howling, was online at the time I originally wrote this at www.myspace.com/mogwai. Most record labels have come to agreements with YouTube and decades of music videos for hit singles and obscure tracks are now online to stream for free, legally.

But really, where is your sense of adventure? CDs don’t cost hundreds of dollars. Domestic CDs are ten to twenty dollars, usually. It's the cost of lunch, or a couple of magazines, three cups of coffee, two beer at the bar, seeing a movie at the theatre, 1/6th of the cost of a tank of gas in an average car, or 1/20th of what your grocery bill probably was this month. Take a risk. If you hate the CD, trade it in or give it away. Maybe you'll discover something you wouldn't have otherwise given a chance.

Studies tend to pop up now and again promoting the idea that this sort of "sampling" actually boosts album sales. We'd really have to have two identical worlds running parallel, one with P2P sharing and one without, to say either way, but I call shenanigans. I'm sure it's helped a few obscure bands, but I'd be willing to bet www.pitchforkmedia.com has done more for indie music in the past decade than any P2P service, and overall, CD sales have fallen dramatically and online sales haven't even come close to picking up the slack. When your industry grows every single year for 50 years and then practically collapses when people start stealing your product online, it strikes me as disingenuous to argue that piracy was not a significant contributor to that collapse.

The other major argument that pops up a lot is two-fold: "Record companies are evil and artists make most of their money on live shows anyway, so I'll steal the albums and attend the live shows".

I addressed this to some extent early when discussing the idea that musicians are particularly wealthy; however, there is more going on here. While it’s true that most artists don’t make a significant amount of money on album sales, consider why this is the case. It isn’t because greedy record companies are nefariously working the squeeze every penny from their artists (usually). Record companies shoulder almost the entire burden of risk when signing a new artist. A record company may sink hundreds of thousands of dollars in to an artist so that the artist has the freedom to record his album, to afford new gear, to be able to rent a bus or an airplane and tour, to advertise the album, to make sure the album is distributed to record stores, and to fund a music video. The record company takes that risk, and they recoup their losses on CD sales while the band makes money on a tour. This isn't to argue that record companies are saints or that artists haven’t signed exploitative contracts - this happens, but record companies are businesses first and foremost. Usually, it’s a mutual relationship - the artist gets something (funding to record, promotion, etc) and the record company gets something (a product to sell).

If you truly believe record companies are evil, don’t by the products they sell. This doesn't mean you're somehow entitled to music. You have no right to someone else’s music. You have no right to my art, or to anyone else's. If you're going to make the decision to protest what you perceive as a predatory and outdated business model, do so, but have the intellectual honesty and integrity to make the sacrifice that entails.

Which brings me to the crux of this post:

Music is a luxury.
Music was someone's hard work.

You don't need music. It's not food. It's not shelter. It's not even clothing or transportation. If music disappeared from your life, your life (unless you work in the music industry) likely wouldn't be dramatically different. I'd be a lot less happy if music was gone from my life, but I'm more involved with it than the majority. Most people would just get on with their lives. No matter how elaborate your carefully-constructed justification for stealing it may be, it's invalid. Period. You can't justify stealing a luxury, for any reason.

And it's someone's hard work.

When you download music without paying for it, you're saying to a person who poured his or her love and care and hundreds of hours of time into creating something that you claim to love that his labour is worthless. You’re saying you are so greedy and selfish that you can't spend $10 on his work that may bring you dozens of hours of happiness when you're perfectly happy to spend the same $10 on a couple of Starbucks coffees.

It strikes me as fantastically ironic when people justify their actions by accusing record companies of greed. You're taking something that doesn't belong to you against the wishes of the people who made it to feed your own hedonism. That's the definition of greed and hypocrisy.

If you're going to steal music, at least admit it. Don't wrap yourself up in some self-righteous cloak of justifications. Maybe sooner or later you'll grow up and realize you're not entitled to everything you want on a silver platter. Maybe if you want something you ought to work for it.