The concept of illegally obtaining audio of my favorite songs is something I learned in grade school when I (along with all of my friends) would create mixed tapes. Sometimes we took the audio from tapes we had purchased. Other times we just recorded what we could straight from the radio.
Then Napster’s meteoric rise and fall came into play when I was in college in the early 2000′s. It became easier and easier to share music with others.
Litigation against Napster turned the popularity of music piracy into a national issue. And the arrival of the iPod and iTunes made it easier to purchase music that we all wanted “instantly.”
And today, new streaming services like Spotify are actually helping to dramatically decrease the number of songs that are illegally downloaded.
I kept all of this in mind while reading a post on The Hill by Elwyn Raymer, President and CEO of the Church Music Publishers Association Action Fund. In the write-up, Elwyn provides several examples of religious music publishers – particularly Christian music publishers – that have lost sales and, ultimately, profits, as a result of digital theft. He makes the clear case of digital theft’s economic implications (lost jobs, lost business, etc.) and takes it a step further by pointing out the cultural and spiritual impact of a shaken religious music industry.
After reading the article twice, I was struck by two things.
First, I wonder how many of the lost sales that Elwyn writes about are the direct result of piracy or the aftermath of a society that, inspired by the immediacy that piracy offered in the mid 2000′s, has turned to streaming and other legal ways to get their music fix. Individuals simply don’t consume audio the same way that they used to. Perhaps the reality is that Napster and other file-sharing services, combined with digital media player technology, created a music revolution that has – like any industrial revolution – resulted in forever lost profits for some part of the industry.
I would imagine that the invention of the television hurt the radio. We know the invention of the DVD player heard VHS companies. And look at how the printing industry struggles to keep up with a world that is increasingly online. The same thing is happening to the music industry. For example, think of how much revenue has been lost now that consumers can purchase just one or two songs from an album without having to buy the whole thing?
Maybe the state of lost sales for several publishing companies is less about piracy issues that need to be addressed and more of a larger industrial shift that will never change. And if that is the case, the challenge for publishing companies is to identify new sources of revenue.
The other thing that struck me in the article was the lack of any mention of sheet music sales. In addition to audio, these publishing companies also sell sheet music (lead sheets and chord books) – both in print and digital format. Has piracy affected those sales, too? With so many liturgical musicians needing only an audio file and chord charts (easily found online for free) to perform the song at a religious service or other event, are fewer people buying sheet music? And for sheet music that’s sold online, are people stealing those via screen grabs and other methods to “capture” what they see on the screen?
Elwyn concludes his post by addressing pending two pieces of litigation that are on the table in Washington: the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House. I have yet to read up on either of these efforts (though I promise to do so), so I can’t comment much further. But I would hope that sheet music is well represented.
These are interesting times we live in. Technology is constantly changing the way we live our lives. Unfortunately, it’s not equally kind to all professionals. Musicians who make a living with their craft of music are finding revenue streams disappear. And to Elwyn’s point, the mainstream artists seem to have more options (concert sales, nice contracts, endorsements, etc), whereas many who make a living writing Christian songs are struggling with the question, “Now what?”