Music piracy has become the way of the new millennium, no doubt—think about it, when was the last time you really paid for music, and how often do you do so? Recently, panic has been running through the piracy community that we so desperately rely upon as the Homeland Security ICE raids (I still don’t understand why Homeland Security is handling this) have been shutting down notable torrent sites and blogs for their illegal activity. So why do we pirate? According to Lupe Fiasco, we “are trapped in the culture where music needs to be free and you don’t need to pay for it.”
I can’t argue against it—it’s become culturally ingrained. Despite devoutly supporting musicians via attending concerts, word-of-mouth, and sharing iPod listens around town, we still disregard the toll piracy takes on the them, and most times, never think about it when we happily click that “Download Now” button on *********.com (I don’t want my favorite site to get shut down. Complete hypocrite). “I was just at Princeton,” Lupe told Boombox.com, “speaking at Cornel West’s class, and someone…asked about the relationship between blogs and artists. I told them, at a bare minimum it costs me, literally out of my own pocket, it costs me $3,000 to $4,000 to make a song. It costs me about $700 to $800 to make a freestyle. I’m giving you that.”
He went on to explain how those out-of-pocket costs are merely crumbs in the wallet:“Just imagine if I work with The Neptunes, including studio time and everything that goes into it — flying people around — it gets up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a song like ‘I’m Beamin’ or ‘I Gotcha.’ So to kinda see it on the Internet and, for some instances, for sale, who are you to have the right to tell me that I shouldn’t demand payment or feel a certain way for seeing people put my music out there like that? If I chose to do that, that’s one thing. But I didn’t choose to do that. That music was stolen.”