Piracy of Digitized Music Essay -- Music Piracy, Digitized Music, MP3,

The music industry has developed in a series of technological advances, from the development of vinyl to the digitization of music and the creation of formats such as compact disc (CD), digital audiotape, and minidisk (Leyshon 2001). Although the digitized music facilitates consumers, it causes the appearance of piracy and the drop of sales. The subject of piracy has occurred for a certain period. Since 1920's, music piracy has appeared into the world with the production of cassette tapes, voice recorders, and CDs, which brought a new kind of event to court. Moreover, music piracy has become a worldwide issue due to the development of downloading music via the internet. Music piracy is something that affects the entire world record industry and is known incompletely by most of people. In accordance with the debates around music piracy, there are many different views on this issue. This paper will analyse the reasons that people pirate music and illustrate the impacts on the music industry. Additionally, it hopes to spread the exact knowledge about music piracy to audiences. Negative Effects According to the RIAA, the industry has to suffer losses by nearly $4.2 billion because of global music piracy. Firstly, pirates are the first to encounter losses due to the severe suppress from recording industry and law enforcement officers. Secondly, consumers also lose personal interests, because the costs of authorized music products will go up along with the Internet downloading of music with shortcut savings. Moreover, piracy could impact negatively on those retailers that give strong backing to their products, whose prices have no competitive power with that of piracy music provided by illegal vendors or free illegimate downloa... ... lot of retailers have gone out of business that is not for internet downloading. Many retailers cannot compete with the discounted prices or special offers record companies give to large established companies such as Best Buy, Walmart, Tower, and Target. As a result, piracy in music industry makes the long term album sale increase, access and exposure of out of print music and it influences the independent and other lesser known artists positively. Conclusion To summarise, piracy in music industry has occurred a long time since 1920’s, which could go via the production which can record and spread music, and internet. It will destroy both the music industry and anything that relies on the music industry; however, it has also caused a number of positive impacts on music industry that increase the sale of album and the popularity of artists and music companies.