Some 30 years back, some popular artist releases their album. There has been talks about it, a lot of hype. And the fans have been waiting since the release date was first announced. And when the day finally does arrive, the kids have got money in their hands, waiting religiously outside the record store to trade the money for something more, and the beautiful magnetic cassette tape with two beautiful sides of art and ecstasy. It was a win-win. The fans got their money’s worth, and the artist, all four of those hard working rock stars who worked their tails off for the past year on this piece of album, got their hard work rewarded.
Flash-forward to the 21st century. So what is this new thing I hear about that can make your music sound anywhere on the go without the hassle of carrying cassettes and cd’s or even worse the 8-inch LP’s. I could carry my world inside this new little thing called the IPOD? And where does the music inside it come from then? And Mr Steve Jobs had an answer for that. Not only would the kids buy this magical gizmo, but they would buy the music inside it. Let’s create a whole new universal record store. The iStore! Sounds like a good story? You are mistaken. This was one step for mankind and a huge step for the downfall of the music industry.
Now I haven’t got anything against Mr Jobs or ipod or his revolutionary idea. What this article is about is the black dot of piracy that succeeded this digitization of music. The nerd kids at home, might like to think themselves as rebels, and the internet as their domain. So obviously when something so easy came to be, the raging hormones must have kicked in. where there is good, there has to be evil. If there is Jobs, or willing bands who upload their music online, there are these people that simply copy this hard work of musicians and paste it up on the internet for anyone to download for free. They call it piracy, I call it murder. Murder of the music industry, and inhuman corruption that fills this space of what has become our lives. This piracy business is more prominent in our country probably because of the lack of “cyber police”. The authorities need to realize that the enemy is not the 6 foot tattooed guy with an armed robbery history. It’s the ‘cool’ ‘rebel’ geek sitting in his bedroom. And what is sad is that the geek thinks he is breaking the monopoly of the system and sticking it up to the man. That is sad…
So the next time you type in “download free latest songs” on Google, just stop for a minute and reflect upon what you are just about to do. You are about to kill the hard work of someone who does that for a living. I say don’t feel liberated with this free downloads. Be a dude and go buy a record from the music store around the corner. As it is, it has begun to gather dust.
