Music Piracy: A Modern Thing?

[aimeeandbeatles]

Or maybe not so much.

I was looking for something else and stumbled on that article in a 1978 edition of Billboard. I know this isn't much of an OP (Im a bit busy at the moment bit I might post later if Im up to it), but:

Discuss.

 

[madviking]

 

[Formaldehyde]

Back then, a handful of people with very expensive equipment made bootleg copies of 8-track tapes and sold them at flea markets. But they usually didn't last as long as the legitimate tapes so they weren't all that popular.

Then along came cassette tapes and lot of people started making their own "pirated" copies of albums because cassette recorders weren't that expensive. But you rarely saw them for sale. People usually did it to make higher quality recordings on better tape because the prerecorded cassettes were so inferior.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Old news is old

When i was a kid i recorded songs with a cassette player from the tv. I had tens of tapes.
That was close to when communism fell tho. So you couldn't actually buy capitalist music from anywhere.

 

[Perfection]

Beethoven didn't write any of his symphonies, he stole them all.

 

[generalstaff]

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.

 

[trader/warrior]

 

[Left]

Used CDs were also a big target. Garth Brooks refused to allow stores that sold used to carry his new CDs.

 

[sophie]

lulz old news is old indeed. The Grateful Dead were actually big fans of bootlegging, which was a big deal at their concerts. By the 80s the Dead actually had specially corded off "tapers sections" for people wanting to record the concerts so they wouldn't get too much interference (which was actually a problem if you ever listen to the shows in the 70s). There was a very large system of tape trading that went on across the country and it only got bigger with the introduction of email.

Now most of the tapes have been digitized, and you can actually listen to just about every concert the dead ever played ever thanks to the efforts of archive.org, which has collected most of the dead show tapes, both soundboard and fan rec (incl. the meh shows at Woodstock and Monterey Pops).

At home I have 3 or 4 bootleg vinyl and a good 3-400 bootleg casettes that my parents collected.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well, I know it was pretty common then. I mean seriously theres an "Official Live 'Leg." But here I was really talking more about copying officially released stuff.

Tho' if you want to go into that, there are sites where you can easily trade and download those thigns. Ethically I dont got an issue with that, I dont think buying or selling is really ethical tho.

 

[sophie]

Well, I know it was pretty common then. I mean seriously theres an "Official Live 'Leg." But here I was really talking more about copying officially released stuff.

Meh, still wasn't as big a deal as it is today. For one thing, no one likes the official stuff of the dead. Their rec studio stuff was near-complete crap.

Secondly, the ease with which tapes got around was much harder back then. It was all about who you knew, and you had to physically go out and get the record/casette. Nowadays all it takes is a simple keyword search and the press of a button. It's a faceless crime that can be committed in seconds.

A couple thousand bootlegs of a record is not financially relevant. A couple hundred thousand piratings of a cd is.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Yeah. I once remember trying to copy a record to a cassette. It involved a lot of different cables and even then the sound quality didnt come out too good. But now theres USB turntables you can just plug into your computer or even just google the name of the album and come up with a dozen torrents.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I found an unintentionally humorous article ca. 1999 that describes piracy:

MP3 works by compressing music into data bits that can be easily downloaded to computer hard drives via free software. The music can then be played back at near-CD quality. Consumer electronics companies have recently rolled out portable, Walkman-like devices that enable listeners to tape copies and play the free music anywhere.
While there are several music compression formats available on the Internet, MP3 has become the de facto standard for Web-based music distribution because of a small underground network of people who illegally have taken entire albums and uploaded them onto Internet sites, available for anyone to download.
That development, coupled with the handheld players, has chilled the heart of the music industry, which fears it could lose millions of dollars in potential royalties.

"downloaded to computer hard drives via free software." This part is amusing to me.
"near-CD quality" only at the higher bitrates, maybe
I assume the "portable Walkman-like devices" are MP3 players, but "tape copies"?
If people didn't know about the illegal sites before, they will now. "ooooh free illegal music!"

 

[sophie]

hahaha. Look how old old technology is! -_-

OwenGlyndwr is not amused by this thread necro.

 

[RebeccaChambers]

I just use YouTube for music.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

hahaha. Look how old old technology is! -_-

OwenGlyndwr is not amused by this thread necro.

Nobody said you had to read it.

About the situation in the article, the MP3 actually got pulled down after a few days. This was mentioned a few months later in an interview:

Warner Bros. had a laugh over the whole thing with me, but I think that it gets uppity out there -- like "We [the labels] are the only game in town." And there's a whole lot of artists that exist beyond the periphery of the corporate music business who suddenly have the power to make this stuff available. It gives these artists a huge outlet -- you can have a little band and just get on the computer and sell your stuff and build all these fan bases for things that are completely outside the music industry. I love the fear it strikes into the hearts of these moguls who have [snip] on us all.

I think he also mentioned somewhere else in maybe the early 2000s that he had no idea how to use a computer heh.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Back in the day, musically talented listeners would go to the Opera House or Music Hall or what have you, and jot down the sheet music. Within a day, the sheet music would be sold by paperboys at a tiny fraction of what the composer or producers charged for legitimate copies. Or so I've heard, I can't seem to Google a source.

 

[dirtyparrot]

This issue has been around from before the time of the printing press.

 

[warpus]

That reminds of back when I had an atari800xl - which had a tape drive (no hd, no disk drive)

All my games came on tape and one day I thought to myself "I wonder what would happen if I copied the tape.. it's the exact same type of tape as an audio tape.. so it should work, right? maybe?" I will never forget the test run.. Me, and friend, and my parents, sat around the tape deck while it made funny beep boop bazoop type noises.. a half an hour later, we were in heaven. That is the day I became a pirate.

 

[Zelig]

All my games came on tape and one day I thought to myself "I wonder what would happen if I copied the tape.. it's the exact same type of tape as an audio tape.. so it should work, right? maybe?" I will never forget the test run.. Me, and friend, and my parents, sat around the tape deck while it made funny beep boop bazoop type noises.. a half an hour later, we were in heaven. That is the day I became a pirate.

Once a pirate, always a pirate?