The constant desire for new music has thrown many of us into a legal no-man’s land, a world of sharing, copying, seeding, listening, repeating. Even the most mundane methods of sharing, whether it be putting an album onto a flash drive or burning a CD, have their legality bizarrely debated.

The recent avalanche of restrictive legislation such as SOPA/PIPA in the United States, draconian means of preventing internet piracy to serve powerful corporate interests and sudden, forceful crackdowns, like the shutdown of Megaupload last month, have created the delusion of a novel political problem. It is tempting to assume this conflict between industry and consumer over widespread ‘theft’ is a modern issue, unique to an internet age still in its infancy.

However, the history says otherwise. The technology for distributing music has always been a step ahead of record companies, the very industries responsible for its distribution. This has always been a source of insecurity and frustration and, like all truly insecure, frustrated people, they have had a tendency to overreact and behave near-ridiculously before working towards reasonable solutions.

The 80s saw the rise of the “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign, borne of fear that home recording on cassette tapes from the radio would spell the apocalypse for the industry. What followed was nothing of the sort. Every major step of progress in the entertainment industry is met with retrospectively absurd backlash; the phenomenon is nothing new.

The true question is whether how the internet is changing the industry is unique. The optimist sees a virtually limitless potential market, a web of interconnected information that, if content distribution may be controlled, represents a massive source of income and certainly the most rapid means of disseminating new content in history.

The pessimist sees anarchy and insufficient political controls to allow any reliable method of securing a market, where the smallest leak in the pipe leads to complete loss of value for the product. Typical supply and demand models fail when free access to copied files is so easy.

The pessimistic view has its failures. Distribution services that have kept pace with the modern era, such as the iTunes Store and Amazon, make substantial profits. In addition, the production investment for digital music is, as one expects, far lower than that for physical products such as CDs. However, there is no doubt the industry is being forced to change.

Record sales have dropped significantly since the turn of the century, approximately 32.1% in the past ten years (adj. for inflation). The primary means of artist income has changed to live performances as ticket sales have grown, giving greater power in the industry to promotional companies and online ticketing services such as Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The recent rise of “360 deals” (see Madonna and Jay-Z), wherein artists are paid by promotion companies in exchange for a cut of their profits from ticket sales and merchandise combined with exclusivity to their venues has further put record companies in jeopardy.

Piracy still dominates distribution and consumers are growing increasingly aware of its vectors. Respondents in a 2008 survey by British Music Rights found 80% of people are interested in a legal P2P service where the final result is a permanent copy on their computer, with much lower interest (63% negative) in streaming services analogous to Spotify. 

Even more intriguingly, the data suggest that when people obtain a constant income, they become far more likely to pay: an average of 13% of tracks in music libraries are not paid for in the 25+ age group, as opposed to 50% in ages 18-24. On top of all this complexity is the rapidly decreasing cost in recording music. Once comparably an exclusive club for professionals in production, recording equipment and software has decreased in cost while increasing in quality. An increased number of artists with the internet at their disposal has created an environment of explosive competition.

While the change at hand is in some ways comparable to the past, the internet era is truly creating something novel. Piracy cannot be stopped. Record companies are falling in power to large-scale promoters. Many are making their music and sharing their music successfully, all independently of industry backing. The climate is an exciting, confusing one for the listener and the critic. And through it all, the data shows one thing: People still want it. People will still pay for it. Lord knows, people still love it. No culture is totally free; someone is just trying to work out how make us pay. Until then, I’ll brave the suspicious pop-ads, every now and then.