P I R A T I Z A T I O N – A Call to Revolution in the Music Industry

I don't how how many of you out there know this but there's a curious little fact about pirates. The terror of the high seas they were but a lot of the pirates we hear about were not, strictly-speaking, pirates. Due to their own dubious agendas, governments often arbitrarily granted mandate to certain ships to operate as privateers. This allowed pirates to operate under a veil of legitimacy. So actually, the distinction between a pirate and a privateer was a pretty subjective one.

At the end of the day the authorization and hence legality of the actions was the thing that formed the distinction. I mean, pirates will be pirates and there's no real way of stopping them. They are piratic by nature and they'll always find ways to slip through the barricades.

The key is to harness their power.

Which brings me to the real subject of this article.

The music industry is locked in a war of attrition it simply cannot ever hope to win. I imagine the executives in this old wooden life boat with all these holes in it and ocean water pouring in by the gallon and these suited-dudes frantically bailing out with their little wooden buckets, frowning grimly.

Let the ocean take you, is the moral of this particular story.

The P2P community started with central server-shared systems like Kazaa. Then the whole Bit Torrent revolution occurred with crusaders such as Limewire and eDonkey and tracking became next to impossible. And yet the P2P developer community continues working hard to upgrade the encryptions and the music industry, well it doesn't seem to stand much chance of ever eradicating P2P networks. So copyrighted material – whether e-books or movies or music – continues to be distributed freely among the masses sweeping the legs out from under the corporate world but also, sadly, leaving artists high and dry too.

The concept of copyright was originally to protect the rights of the artist, but the entertainment industry has somehow managed to work it so that it ends up in possession of all the power and not the creators. Copyright has become a tradeable commodity. With the dawn of digital music and the web, there are now many artists whose works are widely available in a way that they previously would not have been. In fact a lot of these artists are now dealing directly with online distributors like iTunes.

So what do we do? How do we all move forward?

Instead of the entertainment industry continually fighting against the P2P world, they could see this as an opportunity.

The model we're presenting here is based on Reverse Consumerism.

One of the biggest revenue streams in the world at this point is advertising. Everyone is looking for the hottest place to advertise their wares. Millions and millions of dollars are being poured into the pot on a daily basis just for people to plug their shit.

If you were Beyonce for instance, and you had a page were everyone could go to download your new album for free. Her last album sold around 8 million. That's 8 million copies that people actually paid money for. How many more would she have registered as sold if it was legitimately free? How many folk out there downloaded it for gratis via our friendly-neighborhood pirates?

Let's be conservative and just double the figures - sixteen million people visiting that one web-page to download her album for free with quality guaranteed and perfectly legally . How much would an advertiser pay to have a third of that page?

That's where the money needs to come from. It's such a simple model and there are already a whole array of different evolutions on this strategy emerging. This way everyone wins. The folk who would normally download the album via P2P software can do it officially to support the artist and keep things rolling along. They do it also because they know they will get the quality product. And I am sure there will be all manner of other perks that the industry can dream up to entice listeners.

For the lesser known artists – artists who don't have such a strong following as Beyonce – well they all team up. Four – let's call them second-tier artists, to one page; eight third-tier artists to one page; twelve fourth-tier artists to one download page. You see how that works? It brings in the same amount of traffic so is still a hook for the advertisers. Maybe there are issues with the model but so far, I can't see them.

Could this not be the way forward? Is it at least worth the entertainment industry considering it as an option?