GUEST BLOG: Is there anything to be said for piracy?
By Joel Harkin
A few weeks ago, I was watching short form videos on my smartphone, when I came across a video I wasn’t expecting to see on this particular platform in 2025. It was a video of a young person explaining how to download music from Youtube and how to put it on a portable audio player, so you can listen to it whenever you want without paying a subscription to a streaming service.
It felt nostalgic. As a teenager, many different methods of obtaining audio I wanted to listen to had been explained to me by friends and blog posts on dodgy websites. The Pirate Bay, beemp3, Limewire, uTorrent, at least one was mentioned on a daily basis. They were the mediums with which we got access to the music we cared about.
The reason why this particular young person was encouraging their viewers to do this is because of the recent chat of the creation of Spotify super premium and the rumor that they were planning to introduce ads on the premium subscription tier but not on the super premium or pro music tier. There is precedent for this as Amazon Prime has introduced ads on its regular tier with the option to pay an extra £2.99 a month to remove the ads. 1
Spotify have communicated that this will not happen and that premium will remain adless but the reaction to the price increase regardless has been very interesting to me. I’ve seen multiple videos of people saying that as soon as Spotify increases their prices that they’ll be jumping to a different platform to get their music. The price seems to be the main issue for most consumers.
There are umpteen reasons why one would want to avoid using Spotify, like the system by which they distribute royalties (revenue share based on market share instead of the much more artist friendly user centric model). The lack of equitable remuneration on streaming is another thing I take a real issue with. Without ER, session musicians don’t receive a royalty from streaming at all unless it is worked into their contract.
Another issue is the lack of ownership that comes with this type of media consumption. Your subscription is a license fee that permits you to listen to the music available on the service, if the service no longer has the right to distribute the music you want to listen to, you are no longer able to access it, even if you have done so a hundred times in the past. I think that this is something that is becoming more important to people especially after all of the bad craic with the Amazon Kindle and users who have had their Amazon accounts deactivated finding out they are no longer able to access all of the ebooks that they have purchased over the years. There’s loads of things but I’m going to focus on the price here for just another wee bit. I think the price is while important.
I don’t think it was a shift in the hearts and minds of the consumer that convinced them to sign up to Spotify when it first launched. It was not the prospect that artists would be paid a fairer wage or that any money would be flowing to the music industry at all. The music consuming public were mostly pirates in 2008, I was one myself. 95% of music downloaded from the internet in 2008 was pirated music. I don’t think individually any of these consumers actively wanted artists to make less money. It was just more convenient to pirate the music until it wasn’t.
The pirates of 2008 and other years most likely subscribed after Spotify and other streaming services were launched. There have been many studies that say that music pirates spend 30% more on music than their non file sharing counterparts, whether that be on tshirts or gig tickets or physical records or CDs.
I think that piracy was a catalyst that led to the creation of streaming. The major labels needed a way to stop their profits from decreasing due to piracy. Licensing their catalogs to be streamed on spotify would not get them back to the high revenues they saw come in in 2001 at the peak of the CD but it would provide a new way for them to generate income from the intellectual property they own and manage. Now, streaming makes up 86% of the total revenue generated by digital and physical music.
According to the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association who are the trade group for digital platforms and music retailers in Britain and the North of Ireland, 2024 was the best year the industry has had on record. In 2024 the music industry generated £2.39 billion, £170 million more than the £2.22 billion in revenue of 2001. This statistic is misleading as it doesn’t account for inflation. Chris Cooke of Complete Music Update points this out and also confirms that our industry has not recovered fully since the massive decrease in CD sales caused by the rise of piracy and still has quite a bit to go as £2.22 billion in 2001 would be worth about 4 billion now.
In a different Complete Music Update article, Sam Taylor writes:
‘After the devastating impact of piracy and the slump in CD sales in the 1990s and 2000s, the majors rebuilt their business models around streaming revenue - and more recently have rebuilt the streaming industry to suit their business model.’
Streaming 2.0 is the name with which we refer to this rebuilding. It includes the rolling out of the super premium tiers as well as trying to maximise revenue from the super fan. It also changes the royalty distribution system (for the worse). The change will exclude any tracks with fewer than a thousand streams a year from generating any royalties. Their rationale for this is that it will reroute money away from the ‘hobbyists’ and towards what they call ‘working’ artists. That’s certainly one way to put it, I think it could be better described as using thousands of smaller independent and DIY artists’ royalties to increase revenue generated by major label artists, and in turn to make the major labels more money. And they have the gall to call it artist centric! The recorded music industry is currently technically in recession so they have to find some way to grow the revenue of their business. I just didn't think that royalties generated by smaller, independent and DIY artists would be used to do so.
If one engages in the act of music piracy, ie, accessing recorded music without permission or paying for it, that is a crime. But if someone changes the system by which royalties are distributed, so that listening to music that doesn’t surpass a certain threshold of streams in a year, will result in that music, which is being accessed legally, with a paid subscription, the rights holders of those tracks won't see a penny of the subscription used to access the music in the first place. Almost as if it has been pirated? Of course it hasn’t been, a subscription has been paid by the listener, so it’s totally legal, just the money will end up in a different artist’s or label’s bank account, an artist they mightn’t or more likely haven’t even listened to.
Calling it artist centric doesn't change the fact that under this system there will be music that will be streamed by people who have paid to stream it and no royalty will be generated for those streams. It's like they’re saying ‘piracy is grand as long as you don't do it to us’.
If you want to put in the time and effort to pirate my music, mucker, you go for it. If you care about it enough to pirate it, go for it, sham. I definitely wouldn't recommend pirating the music of smaller artists in general, the majors seem to have that base covered with streaming 2.0 but I genuinely can’t think of a reason not to when it comes to the ultra famous major label artists. They've enough money as it is, and perhaps this small act of civil disobedience will form part of a new wave of piracy, one that will bring an end to the era of streaming, as its predecessor ended the era of CD.
And once we reach this Utopian post-streaming state, we can spend our time and money resisting the next clever scheme dreamed up by tech bros and label executives to keep independent musicians from money that they have earned.
Joel Harkin is an alt-folk singer, mastering engineer & pedal steel guitarist.
