418 Discussion Week 4

Author’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

418 Discussion Week 4

While some artists feel that piracy creates opportunities for exposure for them and access to their work for listeners, I have different thoughts. On my part, I feel that the harms done by piracy outweigh the benefits people claim to reap from piracy. Piracy is ultimately devastating to artists’ business because it causes big financial losses to actors, singers, directors, and other individuals who end up missing out on genuine sales and royalties that accrue from legal consumption of artists’ works. Also, piracy harms the artists’ welfare and pension while eating into the financial benefits of many workers who work behind the scenes in these art industries. Furthermore, the harms done by piracy outweigh the merits in that noticeable revenue declines are observable in these industries, a fact confirmed by Wlömert and Papies (2016). An example here is when some stole and leaked the Expendables 3 movie to pirates some weeks before it was released, causing about 70 million illegal views that culminated in a loss of about 20% of its potential revenue (Lang, 2016).

We should not forget that piracy has national budgetary implications seeing that the United States music industry uses billions of dollars in implementing anti-piracy measures, and in the long run, loses about 5 billion dollars per year of revenues to piracy, hence exacerbating the harms caused by piracy (Mahajan & Tripathi, 2020). In short, piracy can ruin an artist’s life by tipping them over the fiscal edge into financial bankruptcy, and those adapting and embracing the new industry of piracy should know that they are not immune to extreme episodes of piracy, hence might lose it altogether. For this cause, I advocate for the continued and enhanced fight against piracy as it is doing more harm than good.

References

Lang, B. (April 15, 2016). Expendables 3’ flops: Is piracy to blame?. Los Angeles, CA. Variety Media, LLC. Retrieved February 04, 2020, from https://variety.com/2014/film/news/expendables-3-flops-is-piracy-to-blame-1201284859/

Mahajan, S., & Tripathi, V. (2020). Three strategies for the music industry to fight piracy. Mumbai, India. WNS Holdings Limited. Retrieved February 04, 2020, from https://www.wns.com/insights/articles/articledetail/308/three-strategies-for-the-music-industry-to-fight-piracy.

Wlömert, N., & Papies, D. (2016). On-demand streaming services and music industry revenues—Insights from Spotify’s market entry. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 33(2), 314-327.