As the piracy level is increasing each year, a lot of companies in music industry become affected. With the latest technological devices like the internet, the access to illegal downloading becomes easier and less people are willing to pay for their music. Such action depreciates talented performers thus making it purely unfair.
One of the people who decided to show his disapproval regarding this matter is Lars Ulrich from Metallica. But instead of getting people to stop downloading music illegally, Ulrich got aggressive feedback from the public calling him greedy and money-obsessed. Therefore this could potentially be the reason why this problem isn't often raised by the artists.
Lilly Allen was another artist who dared to voice her opinion. She exclaimed that older successful artists had already the chance to make money before the arrival of digital piracy but the new artists are the ones who truly suffer as they won't be able to make a living from music career. In the same abusive manner as fellow artist Lars Ulrich got, Allen received aggressive responses and even death threats which made her shut down her website.
As Massive Attack pointed out, the amount of illegal downloads on unlicensed sites is purely shocking. It could be 25,000 per site and if you multiply it by all the unlicensed sites in the world, the artist's whole profit is gone! As Noel Gallangher from Oasis put it "it cost me a quarter of a million pounds to make it, you're not getting it for nothing. I want my quarter of a million back."
Something really poignant was mentioned by Billy Corgan when he compared music culture to service culture due to the fact that now people have the choice to either pay or not pay for their music as the technology allows them to. Corgan also realized that nowadays artists have to please and beg the public to come and see them so they could gain some kind of other profit in this tough industry.
Overall this could very be the changing point for music industry as problems with piracy rise and the level of playing field is dropping in favor of an ordinary synthetic pop star.
