The Internet kills music artists

By Kazuki Nishiyama

Today, we can get any kinds of music in the world on our computer through the Internet. You can put songs you have in your computer on your blog or Youtube and send the songs to whomever you want. Also there is some software which allows us to share music in the world we have on our computer. We can download songs for free, anytime, and rapidly. These websites and computer software programs are very useful for us because we don’t need to go to a shop and pay money for CDs. However, the Internet breaks our respect for musicians and kills their careers in the music industry.

Before the IT revolution happened, we usually bought CDs or records at the shops to listen to music, and we put emphasis on the CDs, records, and music itself. When I was an elementary school student, CDs were too expensive for me to buy so when I got a CD, I took good care of it and listened to it many times as one of my treasures. There were a lot of music fans like me at that time, and music artists could dedicate all their strength to making their CDs and winning fans.

There are still a lot of music fans in the world. However, today, when you get a new song from the Internet and you don’t like it, you can throw it away on your computer whenever you want. Even if you pay to get a song online, when the song isn’t popular any more, you can delete it. In short, just as music for people is declining in value and becoming meaningless, music is becoming just like "Information" for people. People get songs as they get today’s news on the Internet.

Of course these phenomena have an effect on music artists. For example, when my a cappella group released a CD, the number of our songs which were sold outnumbered the songs on our CD. Even when my friend bought our group’s CD, he lent the CD to others and the others made copy CDs. At that time, I thought it was good for us to be listened to on our CD, and if the others bought our CDs as well as my friend did, we would earn more money. We can release a new CD if we can get money from former CDs.

At present, there is no ticket out of the music artists’ predicament. We have to create a new technology and protect the music artists’ rights by some means, for example, "copy control CD," which doesn’t allow you to put songs from the CD on your computer.