It's another new year and I wonder if it is time for the music companies to admit the era of stealing music via the Internet is officially over. Don't hold your breathe but in my opinion, it is time for them to drop that silly argument, it's so, last decade! And, I think it's high time for all of us digital music lovers to go legit because the simple truth is that we won that nasty DRM war. It's over, call it a day! And at the beginning of this new year, maybe today is a good time to examine some of the obvious reasons for this.
When Apple launched the fledgling iTunes Music Store back in 2003 there was quite a lot to complain about. Tracks you bought on one machine were stuck there, thanks to that old netizen bogeyman, DRM (digital rights management). I remember reading about the day when an Apple store was actually picketed by nerds in hazmat suits attempting to educate passersby on the evils of DRM. Maybe this wasn't a seminal moment in this sordid history, but alas, in January 2009, Apple announced that it would remove the entire copyright protection wrapper from every song in its store. Today, Amazon and Walmart both sell music encoded as MP3s, which don’t even have hooks for copyright-protection locks.
A few years ago, audiophiles dismissed iTunes’ 128-Kbps resolution as anemic, even though it supposedly passed rigid blind testing against full-bandwidth CD tracks of the same song. The sound is compressed, connoisseurs said. The high end is mangled. Have you heard that argument recently? Probably not and one reason is that online stores have cranked up the audio quality to a fat 256 Kbps. To most ears, it’s indistinguishable from a CD. It’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on any of the torrent servers. For those of you reading this that still hate the sound of digital music, you probably need to go back to vinyl. You can get a pretty good turntable from around $500 to over $2500.
Let's be real honest with each other here; most all of today's music is so cheap, there’s no reason not to buy. Besides, many downloads send 20 cents straight to the band. You read that right, straight to the band, baby! If you are still a digital music hater, you might get a bit more traction with the major gripe that official stores still don’t carry every track ever recorded. But, over time, you might finally see AC/DC join the Beatles in iTunes. For other artists, contract restrictions mean some songs can’t be downloaded in every country, which indeed seems rather out-dated and very backward for a store on the border-free Internet. Here in the Sates for example, we can’t buy Daniel Zueras’ 2007 Spanish hit “No Quiero Enamorarme” from the iTunes store for Spain. Still, the available inventory keeps growing, including many artists’ back catalogs. I have recently discovered more and more tracks that I used to spin weekends at the massive events I was involved with are available from iTunes, Amazon and others. Way back in the day, only a couple of years ago, I was struggling to find digital copies of many of these same tunes!
So, for most of today's remaining digital pirates, that leaves one last lonely war cry: Music should be free! It’s art! My response to that is; are you kidding me? I mean, a song costs but 99 cents. Walmart has pushed some of its MP3s down to 64 cents. At most online stores, you can sample any song you want before you buy. Still too much for you cheapskates? Rdio charges $5 a month for all the music you can eat, served up via the cloud! So then, when all is said and done, there’s really no reason not to buy.
After reading this, surely I have convinced you that there are reasons why you should buy. The most obvious; when you buy instead of steal, you’re actually paying the band. Most download retailers send about 70 percent of each sale to the record companies that own the music. Artists with 15 percent royalty deals get 15 percent of that 70 percent, or about 10.5 cents per dollar of sales. Musician who write their own music and own their own music publishing companies, like me, for instance, get another 9.1 cents in “mechanical royalties.” So, when you add it all up, every download actually does send 20 cents straight to the band and those are pretty firm numbers. The real truth for me in 2011? If you are still stealing music nowadays, you're just cheap!
