Ahoy me Pirates! Music Piracy and all that!

Washington Post has an interesting article on NBC’s Jeff Zucker ranting on about bigger penalties for music pirates. And for all that’s worth, the article makes him sound like his YouTube clone. And in related anti-piracy news, the defender organizations employed by MPAA & RIAA seem to be ending up with eggs on their faces, or rather their internal emails being made public. The cake is however taken by Sony BMG’s anti-piracy chief whose utterly ridiculous stand is that ““Copying” music you own is “stealing””. And as is true with most people who are out of their depth AND in deep shit, lawyers are making merry.

Now this is hilarious. We have companies suing individuals, tracking IP addresses, corrupting p2p systems, having dummy BitTorrent servers; all going helter-skelter in their approach to fight the so called music & video piracy (Alas, we book pirates don’t even register on the radar). Some are just changing tactics; Radiohead’s going for a $ 0 Album thingy with their new album (In Rainbows) & The Artist Formerly Known As Prince releasing (giving away?) his album (Planet Earth) free with the Mail on Sunday …strange & unsettling times for an industry which has been dishing out crap to consumers for a fairly long period of time now.

I just think that Piracy is helping them more than they realize. Sure CD/DVD sales are being cannibalized, but Dead superstars seem to be getting richer every year – surely more than what can be attributed to nostalgia. All the nostalgic ones get older every year, btw. While everybody might have heard about Led Zep, surely not a lot of people could have afforded to have hear it – simply because if I stack up all Led Zepp albums, Amazon tells me that I have to shell out a cool $124.99, not the kind of cash a college freshman can afford to throw around ( am assuming that’s the age folks discover Zeppelin). Even the live ones, seem to be earning more every year.

Simple question, why? Because the economic rent that any artist is able to generate is directly proportional to the value of that artist’s network (Metcalfe’s Law, anyone?) –networks which are created because of Piratebay, Morpheus, Limewire, Pando, edonkey and so on. The fans aren’t just increasing because of higher marketing budget; a huge-huge chunk today feeds of the Terabytes (Exobytes?) of data coursing through the world’s pipes. Free data. Pirated data.

But yes, the business model has to change. You can’t count on slick releases and the consequent ringing cash counters any longer. Maybe iTunes has got it right to an extent, but not completely. As long as information would be freely available and people will have a choice about who they want to like, there’ll be a business and money to make. What today’s networks do is to ensure that another N’Sync (remember?), Britney & whoever can’t be created to milk consumers. You’ll have one hit single and people will not pay for that too, they’ll leech it off some torrent or P2P server. In the end, water will find its true level – fans will ensure that. But the easy times, they’re all over!