‘Why Piracy is Perpetuating Plastic Pop’ By Helienne Lindvall

Artist have been weary about speaking out against piracy since the band Metallica experienced a 'massive public backlash’ for suing Napster. 

One of the few artists who dared to speak out and ‘voice their opinions’ was Lily Allen. She lashed out to a couple of older and successful artists after they declared their opposition to online copyright enforcement. She argued that it was easy for them to get on the freebie bandwagon as they’d already made money from the music industry, but most younger artists would never get the chance to even make a living from music. She then got targeted by thousands of people and she received abusive messages and even death threats which eventually caused her to shut down her website. 

Many artists who became famous before the ‘digital age’ have said that they find it frightening to see the amount of unlicensed downloading sites there are on the internet. 

“This is how I make my living. It can be 25,000 (per site). Multiply that by all the (unlicensed) sites in the world and that can be my whole profit gone.” 

This scared me when I read it. The internet is such a powerful thing that it has the ability to shut down companies and peoples careers with people input with just the click of a button ‘download’. 

Noel Gallagher spoke about the situation as well as Lily Allen although Noel was a lot more blunt about it. 

“The consumer says ‘Wheres my free music on the internet? Is this a free download?’ F**k Off! It cost me a quarter of a million pounds to make it, you’re not getting it for nothing. I want my quarter of a million back, thank you very much. Thats why we’re rock stars.” 

He also added that the reason why tours have become so long is because people need to have more shows to make up for the money they are loosing on the illegal downloading sites.

“Records dont get any cheaper to make, they get more expensive to make. I say this as an independent artist. I’m on my own record label. It isn’t backed by anybody else. I pay for it all. Everything.”

After reading Lilly Allen and Noel Gallagher’s side of the story i do think that it is really important that we do not illegal download anything of the internet. This is their job and how they make a living and people should not take that for granted just because they might have a lot of money. 

I think that when producing my own product I will think about the time and the effort that I have put into making it look good and sound good and then imagine people taking the Micky out of the work i have done and almost stealing it like they do when they download their music, then I will times this feeling by 10 and think about how the artists must feel.