The Medium is the Message

This blog post is for the lecture on November 14^th, 2018.

For this lecture we came to class having read Witt “How Music Got Free.” As a whole the book was a lot of legal working between copyright laws between the music industry and the people that wanted to set it free. As a person who personally doesn’t like to pay the price that iTunes puts forth of an arm and a leg per song, I used to find other ways to get my music. However, now that I am older and have my own money to spend, I tend to buy the songs because I want to support the authors in their songwriting so that they will continue to create the music that I enjoy so much. Because of piracy, the amount of money that people got paid for their art got reduced drastically.

As Witt stated “The album moved nearly three million copies and was the bestselling release of 2008. But it failed to do even half the business that Get Rich or Die Tryin’ had done just five years earlier. The same numbers in 2000 wouldn’t have put it in the top ten.” My opinion on this quote depends on how much money the person is currently making. If they are still making a dollar per download per song, then that is plenty to sustain their music and their livelihood in order to focus solely on music. However, if this amount has decreased to a number that cannot sustain their industry, then it is not enough. If the music industry was reduced by such a significant amount, then that goes to show just how much of a revolution this was. I understand that there had to be a “revolution” of sorts in order to set music free because of the tight hand that the copyright industry had on music pirating back in the day, and not everyone could afford to have or risk getting certain kinds of music.

All of this being said, and as Witt noted, I think piracy is much less of an issue now-a-days due to how much cheaper and easier it is to get music even while paying for it. As Witt noted, “’You could still do that, I suppose,’ said the former pirate kingpin, ‘or you could do what I do: pay nine bucks a month for Spotify, like everyone else.’” The majority of people currently have either Spotify, Pandora, or any other music service that lets you pay one price a month for the millions of songs you could be downloading. I personally have Pandora, which is more proof for Witt’s theory than I would ever need.