MADE

Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger gave an interesting response to a question about music profits recently. He said:

But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

That nearly thirty year window of profit-making was made possible largely because of the CD. It’s hard to point to one particular thing and say that’s what caused musicians’ profits to plummet. There’s a litany of scapegoats, including plain old bad music being promulgated by people who just cared about making loads of money. The elephant in the room is always music piracy though. It’s the first thing record companies will point to. I think the detrimental effects of music piracy have been overblown, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have anything to do with plummeting record sales. It does.

I know plenty of people who download music illegally all the time. Several CDs a year aren’t being purchased because these people get their music for free. And there’s millions of other people around the world just like them who aren’t buying albums because they’re downloading them for free online.

But just because someone isn’t paying for the music itself doesn’t mean there isn’t a financial transaction between that person and a music related company or person somewhere. It just so happens that instead of it being the musician or record label, it’s some other entity like, say, Apple. After all, they created the iPod that stores most music. Is it fair? I don’t know. I guess it depends on who you talk to. The musician or record label will say, “Hell no!”. But to someone at Apple, it doesn’t matter how the music was obtained so much as the fact that it’s being stored on an iPod.

Invoking fairness when it comes to music piracy gets dicey because we aren’t really dealing with pure morality. There’s a few reasons for this.

Let’s start with the New York Times, which reported last year that the Indonesian Government was opening thousands of “honesty cafes” across Indonesia as part of its anti-corruption campaign. It’s designed to teach people to be honest in hopes of curbing the country’s corruption problem. There’s no cashiers at these cafés. The point is that if you’re an honest person, you’re going to leave money in the jar when you take something off the shelf. As the article points out, the results are mixed so far. Some people who take things at the café are honest and leave money, but others aren’t.

In the abstract, the idea sounds very nice, but in the real world, things are always more complicated. There are shades of gray when it comes to what people consider theft. All theft isn’t equal. To many people, stealing a pack of gum isn’t like stealing, say, a textbook. And even the idea of what constitutes theft can change within an individual. Duke University economist Dan Arielly has done research which shows that cheating on one occasion makes it easier for people to cheat on other occasions because cheating once alters one’s self-concept (Kind of like breaking your workout cycle. You say, “I’ll just work out tomorrow” and you don’t and you keep gaining weight until being fat becomes normal to you. It’s likely that porn actors also alter their self-concept to gradually delude themselves into thinking that performing sexual acts for complete strangers to see is normal).

So when you suddenly give people the opportunity to steal a pack of gum, they might graduate on to bigger things. Then you potentially create a whole class of people who think stealing is OK.

Of course, there’s a limit to how dishonest most people will get. It’s doubtful that most people who take a pack of gum without paying for it will graduate to hardened crime. But the larger point is that people’s easy and natural tendency to change their conception of themselves can have huge implications for society and industry. I think that music piracy has become normal for many people because of this psychological capacity. In fact, the expectation that music should be free has hardened into ideology for many younger people.

But for just about everyone (except hardened criminals), stealing other people’s physical property will never become normal the way stealing music is. That’s because psychologically, the two are very different. Piracy is a special class of crime because the costs to the owner are intangible. In other words, if I illegally download your song, I haven’t taken something you own, I’ve taken a reproduction of something you own. This is a very important distinction because when I pirate a copy of your song, you don’t suffer a loss, but rather a lesser gain.

The human mind doesn’t really register that as outright theft, even though to the creator of the song, it’s an indirect theft of time, effort and mental output that feels all too real.

I think one of the reasons it’s so hard to get most people emotionally riled up over music piracy is that when someone steals a song there isn’t clear cut zero sumness. In other words, it doesn’t feel like I’ve take something and you’ve lost something. Even though the music creator does in a sense lose the time and effort he put into creating the song, I can’t see it and therefore can’t really relate to it emotionally.

The human mind has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to best understand and relate to the visual world of physical objects. The concept of stealing digital bytes is too intangible and abstract for most people to visualize. It’s much easier to visualize my neighbor’s car getting stolen. And that might make me mad as hell because I can clearly see that he unfairly lost something that rightfully belonged to him and I can put myself in his shoes.

Or try this thought experiment. Lets say you just wrote a book and are getting ready to send a draft copy over to the publisher. You invite me over for a cup of tea and I slip out with the draft copy. Then I pirate 80% of what’s in it and manage to get it published. OK, similar situation, but this time you invite me over for several hours to talk to me about what’s in your book. Over the next several months, I write and publish a nearly identical book. In your mind, which one’s a worse form of stealing? Most people will say the first situation and won’t really be able to explain why they think that way. But it’s because they equate the act of taking a physical copy of something that doesn’t belong to you with stealing more than they do a digital copy. But in both cases you’re stealing the same thing.