Issues

Piracy:-



One main issue created by new media technologies in the music industry is piracy. A survey in 2006 found that piracy of CDs lost the music industry £165 million in 2005, 10% of sales. One of the main culprits of music piracy is file-sharing, a main file sharing program is Limewire, it is downloadable from the internet and allows users to download music for free that they would normally buy or pay to download. The new media technologies in the music industry do not encourage illegal activity by means of music piracy but it does allow it to happen and make it easy, the fact that fans can merely get their friends to email them albums by their favourite bands makes it so that people will not choose to buy songs when they know they don't need to. However, it has been publicised that music piracy is not a "soft option" an article by the bbc reported on a husband and wife who were sentenced to a total of 5 and a half years for a multi-million plan to de-fraud the music industry by importing pirate CDs and selling them in stores and markets. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2008/04/03/redbridge_cd_piracy_feature.shtml)



In the near future it is not apparant that music piracy will cause loss of jobs or shops to close down but in the long term it is likely to happen if the problem isn't solved. However, CD piracy has been said to "hit CD sales," an article from the bbc stated that a survey in America on college students said that the music industry loses a fifth of a sale everytime a song is downloaded from the internet. It also said that a downloader saves up to 20% on the total amount of money they spend on music because of downloads. Some moral panics are generated by the new music technologies, the fact that people can view other people's playlists on programs such as iTunes does create the worry that it has made it easy for people to hack into other's computers. A study in America stated that the average computer has had a number of viruses that have originated through file sharing etc.