Pelican guitarist Trevor de Brauw recently addressed the a rather broad question regarding the state of the music industry copyright reform and piracy in general. Speaking with Heavmedia.com, he offered:
“I wish I had answers for this, but I really don’t. There’s so many sides to the question and so many perspectives, especially from generation to generation, that it’s not really possible for the various sides to ever see eye-to-eye or come to any real resolution. Coming from the 90s – the era of tape trading and, eventually, CD burning – I have always thieved a percentage of my music, but it’s always been secondary to the feeling of owning the album or the song.
I live by an edict that was verbalized quite well by music critic Christopher Weingarten: “steal as much music as you can, buy as much music as you can afford.” And I do buy a lot of music because I am a collector and obsessed with music and records. And I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with stealing an album in order to preview it before you’re willing to part with cash on an actual copy. In the old days you’d buy an album and if it sucked you got burned; I’m as happy as anyone to leave those days behind.
But I do think that something has to change. I could go the old guilt trip routine about how our band is at a level that we should be able to make a living off our music, but with the record sales we lose to theft we can’t afford to do the band full time and have to approach it as a hobby. But no one sympathizes with those stories because who has the right to say that they deserve to make a living off of music, right?
But the way I see it it’s not really the high-sense-of-entitlement bands that are getting burned on the deal, it’s music fans like myself, who are going to see recorded music decline with each passing year. If labels can’t sell records, can’t even break even on them, there’s no incentive to keep making them. Putting out a record is a huge gamble to begin with, now that sales are declining who the fuck would want to take that kind of risk?
And what’s left is bands trying to fund their own recordings so they can sell them via platforms like Bandcamp or give them away, which means budgets keep getting lower, which means records start sounding shittier – all fine and good of course since digital music sounds like crap to begin with.
Think about an album like Loveless – that record had an insane recording budget, required the label to take a tremendous risk. That record would never, never, never happen now – it’s not even remotely possible for anyone to consider investing money like that in an album because it will not recoup. The same will soon go for incredibly artistically ambitious “commercial” albums like Dark Side of the Moon, or Exile on Main Street. And it’s not killing the bands – the bands will continue making their music, but we’ll be the ones who have to live with the inferior version of their master vision, or no recording of it at all because there’s no budget for it.
I don’t know how to shift the gears on a sea change like this. There needs to be huge cultural shift to understand that the recorded arts are being neglected. Music piracy would need to be stigmatized.
I think there should be more enforcement – not the way the RIAA have gone after music fans and sued them for ridiculous sums for stealing music, but the platforms for stealing music. I don’t know that fines and lawsuits settle anything, but if there were at least some online oversight going on and taking down illegal download links it would make things better. Potentially.”
