CD piracy hits music industry

It doesn’t astonish us nowadays knowing that mp3 is one of the most common search parameters on Internet. Being wired being the common definition now of being alive, the practice has caught up fast and is growing in an alarming rate. Together with easily available CD burning hardware, CD-ripping software and p2p file sharing protocols, CD piracy is now a common trend supported especially by the teenagers and young adults, who are not financially, stable enough to afford legal music. Who is to blame?

• Music Industry and CD piracy

While clichéd opinions are galore (“it’s the people who do it and not the soft-/ hardware”), many are blaming the music companies for putting up an atrocious price for every album released. However, movies do not suffer this drastically; they are priced cheaper and people don’t seem to enjoy the same movie for more than once. Music, on the other hand, is an evergreen phenomenon to the follower of a particular genre; it becomes better with every listen. One may pose a question regarding such a perennial thing – “Then how does it hurt to pay once for years of entertainment?” but fact remains that building a music collection is a passion; if one has to buy every album he/she likes, the passion would run dry within sometime. Again, it points towards the atrocious prices of the music CDs.

The Music companies thought a lawsuit is enough to bar the most popular p2p sites from returning to action; what they didn’t realize is you cannot stop people from copying the legally purchased music. All right, copy-control was introduced to fight the symptom, but there are also present the computer whizzes.

CD duplication

So the next step was to introduce the legal downloads. While this measure has been more or less successful to hit an even point between the music industry and CD piracy in the first world countries, it couldn’t do much for those in the third world. Internet is still a big tool to the music freaks there for exchanging music, thanks (or, curse) to Morpheus.

• How to curb CD Piracy

“It’s a monumental problem; banks won’t even let music companies inside the doors. And I was laughed out of every investment house in America. Everyone wants to see where it’s going.” – says Miles Copeland (Founder, Copeland Group).

Supporters of CD piracy still threat the music industry or the entertainment business as a whole and curbing the ability for copying music/video even for personal usage from a legally purchased album or VCD is not appearing the right solution. Shall reducing the price further for music CD curb CD piracy then?

Not exactly, for there exists a group to whom the fun is to procure without paying. Someone proposed stopping the production of blank CDs, but even that’s an absurd idea. So the next option remains is to introduce a technology (much more advanced than the usual copy-control) for protecting CDs from getting copied. For ordinary copy-protected discs often don’t work on portable/car/DVD- combo players. So how about making them real inexpensive? If an album comes for a dollar (that’s right, for there shall be no printed sleeves, artworks or jewel box), it shall be the best way to make a whole generation go the right way.