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Great Rebuttal of Idea that Pirates Killing Music Industry

: Image via Wikipedia

TorrentFreak is a great resource for those interested in the world of copyright, P2P, “piracy” and the future of digital content.

Recently, in response to claim in the Swedish court case against popular torrent tracker The Pirate Bay that piracy was the primary cause for the decline in music sales for the major labels, TF’s Jens Roland has written a brilliant 8-point rebuttal that ends with these thoughts:

The fact is that the music industry’s revenues have been artificially inflated for decades because of limited consumer options. The last 15 years of innovation have lifted those limitations, effectively leaving the music industry with an obsolete, defective business model of monopolized production technology, forced album bundling, and almost nonexistent competition in the realm of home entertainment. What is happening now – the decline of music profits and the piracy witch hunt by the music industry – is merely the panicked struggle of a dying business model, a complacent industry’s refusal to accept its diminishing role in a digital world. The pirates are not the reason, and the decline is the not the disease. It is the cure.

I highly recommend reading his entire post. While it is important for artists to have ways to be compensated for their efforts, there is no reason it should be done the same way in the face of massive innovations and there is also no reason that the artists’ work needs to support a vast network of middlemen who provide less and less service to the artists or the fans.