Everything Everything on Music Piracy

What's your stand on music piracy and illegal downloading? Chances have it this applies to the majority of 14-18 year olds attending Underage festival next week, many of whom will have torrented your music ahead of seeing you.
 
Some of us are guilty of this, admittedly. Some of us are against it. As such we avoid the subject amongst us, it's definitely a bad thing for the industry, a good thing for the consumer, and a mixed bag for the artist.

I do think it devalues music though, makes it too readily available/disposable. The sense of working you way through an artist's career and output gradually is lost when you just a torrent a discography; decades of work digested, judged and maybe deleted in a matter of minutes.

For The Masses

Ben meets Hadouken! (well, sort of).

Let's go for a serious question – What's your stand on music piracy? Chances have it this applies to the majority of 14-18 year olds attending Underage festival next week, many of whom will have torrented your album ahead of seeing you.

Pilau Hadouken (Guitarist):

"It's a really tough one. We don't like to lecture our fans or preach to them about it because we understand that when you're young you don't have a lot of free cash and if you have the option to get something for free instead of paying for it then you're going to take it!

“However, we as a band do suffer because of it and we can't deny that. A lot of people think anyone in a band is a millionaire but that's just not the case for 99% of bands.It costs bands a lot of money to record, mix and master an album and to buy all the equipment and hire all the crew needed to put on tours and if they aren't able to make that money back then they wont be able to keep doing it for long, and nobody wants to see decent bands splitting up because they can't afford to keep doing what they do.”

“...so we're really grateful to any fan that does buy the music or even just comes down to a show and picks up a t-shirt or something from the merch desk, the support means a lot to us. We are on our own independent record label so fans should know any money they spend on us goes back into us being able to keep touring and recording!"

Christopher Hadouken (Bassist):

"Difficult one dude. I mean, we have a typically younger demographic, hitting all the student markets right the way through to university students and beyond. Everyone within that market is internet savvy and the majority pirate music. We certainly have financial struggles caused by such a depleted income from a lack of people actually buying the record. but so long as people keep on coming to shows and buying tickets, we can keep on going.”

“The main problem is there isn't a business model to compete with how incredibly easy it is to pirate music. The speed of internet connections now means it takes longer to buy a record on itunes than it does to torrent it!”

“It'll work itself out, someone just needs to come up with an idea which makes people want to part with money for music. Spotify has the right idea, but artists don't really see any royalties.”

"I could talk about this all day, but yeah there are arguments in favour and against piracy, both of which have their merits."