We Use To Be Pirates

SongsBrew Editorial

The age of musical piracy

For many music lovers of a certain age, finding new music has become a treasure hunt. Burned CDs, tapes of your favorite bands on the radio, and eventually, internet access arrived. FrostWire, LimeWire, BearShare - everyone had a favorite, but it was always illegal. Downloads of albums that were rarely the right thing came with the risk of viruses.

Tracks labeled as Radiohead would be a recording of an unknown band with no internet presence; you’d fall in love and never be able to find them. Every single potentially corrupted MP3 became a prized piece of a hard-found playlist.

Blank CDs were purchased in the hundreds, not tens, and every single one had a unique handwritten name emblazoned across it. You’d make them for other people, too.

Self-taught music hunters, learning the fine art of limited space, selecting the perfect tracks, and knowing that at any moment any of those sites could be gone.

WMP was your best friend, and seeing the pixelated, colorful swirls dance around the screen while your low-budget speakers trundled through the tracks was thrilling. 

Back when we had to try

There was a thrill to it. While it was frowned on then, and we sure don’t love it now, it was the thing. Spending all of your internet time letting albums that looked like they might be the right one download. Painstakingly slowly. WinRAR and you are now the best of friends. Peering into your newly downloaded and unzipped file to see 87 folders, and looking for which one contains the song you so desperately needed.

Music libraries were built slowly, carefully, file by file. Renaming files, removing unwanted characters, and questioning the legitimacy of a 320 kbps.

Did we care more about music in the time of pirates and thieves than we do now?

Not just about the music. The lack of space, the unpredictability of the music, the quality, the risk of losing your whole computer, and the tiny space on discs. Of course, iPods changed the game in terms of space, but before that? MP3 thumbdrives did the trick.

Every single part of this process was long and all-consuming. Because when you listened back to your newly burned CD, and the transition doesn’t work, you’d need to redo it. No simple click and drag to reorder and hit play. Reorder and burn a fresh one was the only way.

The bonuses of obscure mixes, or the releases from other countries, were a delight and nothing you could plan or predict, small gifts for hours of hard work.

And while it was an experience, a snippet of time that will never come back thanks to music streaming platforms, it was always illegal.

And never forget, Spotify was built on the model of piracy, and is now (accused of being) royalty thieves - how the tides have turned.

What did we lose?

Music streaming has given us beautiful audio quality that improves with technology, the ultimate in convenience, and access like we never had before. Finding new music is now frictionless, maybe a little too frictionless…

We risk nothing, we find everything, we never have to wait, and we own nothing either. (Not that we owned the pirated music, but you sure felt like you did.) The algorithm wants you to listen to what it wants, be happy, accept it, and move to the next song in about 3-5 minutes.

It’s not that there isn’t excitement in it, and it’s almost unfair to compare the two, but the feeling of dragging and dropping in a digital playlist versus burning a CD that had to be perfect is vastly different. We should also mention that people are still torrenting today.

Stealing and streaming

Piracy never supported the artist financially. And while there is a case to be made on how popular some artists were due to piracy, it still didn’t pay their bills. Streaming didn’t exist yet, and buying music was costly.

Now you can get access to millions of songs for the same price as a double album CD.

Streaming fixed the legality of internet music, but hasn’t fixed the economics. Artists continue to fight year after year to earn more revenue from their legally streamed music. Signing petitions, reaching out to fans, pulling music from platforms… the list goes on.

Maybe the question, if there was one, isn’t about whether piracy is better or worse. Perhaps the real question is whether this new, fully paid-up, low-cost streaming system is better for the artist? Is it more insulting for the artist to have their music stolen, or to be paid 0.0001 cent for 1000+ streams?

We used to be pirates; now we are poor-paying customers.

A Final Note

Until next time,