Damn the pirates!

The most dramatic emergency in the World is not hunger, is not war, and is not underdevelopment. The problem, the big problem of the next twenty years won't be energy sources control, or the even more fundamental risk of a total privatisation of water resources, that war for water which has become more than a simple shadow. No, the world emergency is record piracy, and it's the latest, most plaintive, most menacing, most obsessive, most threatening of the infinite series of laments cried by the record industry during the last twenty years.
Obviously I won't deny (how could I) the existence of piracy nor will I deny the damage it brings to the record industry. I would – maybe cynically, but, as we know, a cynical and disenchanted view helps seeing the truth - say that who damned himself, should cry for his own sort.
I would say that if I didn't hate commonplaces, and commonplace, almost a proverb by now, is that the blame for the crisis of the record industry is to be put on piracy.
Maybe it depends on the fact that, ever since I write and work with music (and it’s been a really long while now) I keep hearing that record industry is in a state of – apparently irreversible – crisis. The fact is, when I first heard about this story, consumer digital recorders were a long while away.
Yes, piracy, a small-scale kind, was already around.
There were those who illegally copied cassette tapes, a practice made possible by one of the pillars of the recording industry, Philips, who invented the Stereo 4 cassette tape. But, but most of all there were the “reinterpreted” pirate records, famous or hip singles sung and played by completely unknown and unheard of names. I remember the van, equipped with a PA announcing and selling these somewhat pathetic clones. They were cheap, but had a very limited appeal; still, even at the time (it was the end of the Sixties), someone was crying for the end of the record industry. Some years later, that someone had become everybody.

Some time ago, the magazine I was editing at the time, Suono, organised a conference, “Le giornate della Musica” (The Music Days), to which politicians, managers of cultural institutions, important members of the record industry, songwriters and singers were invited. I was asked to open the session dedicated to the record industry. I begun by telling an old joke which left the attendance (mainly made of record industry members) quite stunned. The joke: a hare and a snake stroll around the wood. Suddenly, a storm breaks. The two animals look for cover and they enter, at the same time, an old empty tree trunk, one at one side, one at the other. Inevitably, the two bump one on each other amid the trunk: “Gosh, what are you? No, don’t tell me, I’ll try to guess… Lemme think, big ears, big front teeth, soft fur???… You are a hare!” “Right, wait a minute, it’s my turn: sneaky, no balls, no ears… you must be a record industry member!”.
The joke is undoubtedly over-generalising and over-simplifying, like all those which aim at an entire category, but it is more than a little truthful, in that the record industry is the most blind, short-sighted and black-or-white one can come across.
People who know nothing about music too often lead record labels; people who think that music and its fruition can be completely run by pocketsize marketing manual logic.
I take for granted that no idea underlies those money-seeking, illogic strategies, culturally and intellectually devoid of any value, other than a completely market driven concept of music and its recording activities.
The truth is that, for each Wilma Cozart Fine, there are hundreds of brainless, cool-dressing executives who couldn’t care less about music, and whose one idea is making the most profit out of everything fussing an organised or random noise. I can’t find any other explanation for so many huge productions, so many titles on the market, the attention and the investments on unworthy music and unworthy musicians which – not to be snob or elitist, it’s just a matter of realism – simply don’t sell. They don’t sell just because a low quality product is offered at too high a price, and it’s a product which is on the verge of becoming still lower in technical quality because of those worthless anti-copy traps.
I am not exactly below the poverty line, but I still have got a family to feed so have to make my plans in order to do that; add that I madly love music, and have a more than respectable collection of recorded music.
Well, if a guy like me decides to give up buying records except for those which nobody can do without, you can figure out what the average guy, who doesn’t consider music a primary interest but just a mean of relaxation, can do.
By the way, I realised that only a bunch of the above mentioned records have come out in the last years.

Let’s put it straightforward: records prices are out of this world, and in most cases, if you can’t do without listening a particular song, a little bit of patience and a tuner will reward you.
Even leaving aside the fact that the media the small-scale, home piracy or the industry-scale one use are in most cases produced by those same companies which claim to be damaged by piracy itself, or by their conglomerate partners, we must understand that the problem is not piracy.
The problem is a matter of quality, of investment planning, and of the mad 20 $ or 20 ? price for a silver disc.
But you can’t say this small and tautological truth, without being pursued by crowds of figures, often devoid of any logic and without any relation with the issue, all demonstrating just one and the same thing.
And the thing is, music fans are bastards and ingrates who just don’t want to finance those who are on a mission for them.
They are instead ready to copy in-house what the Majors want them to buy, or to get it for five Euro from the immigrant down the road, who in most cases gives them in exchange an object which is as worthless as the original one.
What the majors tell us is that, doing that, we end up financing the drug market, the arm dealers, and even pornography and paedophilia, taking us by the gut of our moral principles.
It is a partisan truth, but it is one that leaves us thinking.
I thought about it: I don’t own a CD recorder and don’t buy pirate copies, since I don’t want to finance large scale crime; but, as I said before, I don’t buy original records anymore, because I don’t want to finance large scale imbecility either.

I am not the first to say this but music distribution, thanks to the new technologies - Internet first - is changing in a no-return way and record companies must change their policies, including the balance sheet ones, pretty fast in order to adapt to this changed reality.
Otherwise, they are doomed to manage horse races (no offence to those who do it as a job) than on events involving what they call “artists” – that’s the word the members of the music industry and their servants across the press, radio and television pretentiously, uniformly (and most of the time undeservedly), use even for the worst ragman of the voice.