Treasure Island

Disclaimer: This blog is not about the famous book - I just start off with it to draw a few parallels and get to my eventual point. If you are not a bookworm, worry not, the only thing you won't understand in this blog is pretty much the first paragraph! So here goes -

I'm not a literary critic (or any other form of critic for that matter), but from the perspective of an avid reader who cannot tolerate heavy literary works, I'd say Robert Louis Stevenson did a brilliant job in writing about a group of pirates in search of a long lost treasure. This book was first published in 1883. One of the most famous parts of the book (atleast for me personally) was the pirate song

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--

...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

It was more than a hundred years later, in 1989 to be precise, that the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the UK. Trivia: He was honoured at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony by the way - for those of you who didn't know this. Anyway, getting back on track, with the advent of the Internet, life as we knew it changed completely, and so did the definition of piracy. See, now we can be pirates sitting in the comfort of our homes. And we are no longer in the search of long lost buried gold in the remotest islands of the world. Instead what gets looted now is usually the different forms entertainment - in fact, too many for me to probably even know. But the popular ones off the top of my head are music, movies and TV shows - atleast the ones that I am mostly familiar with.

Piracy in the entertainment industry is basically accessing copyrighted materials online illegally. Contrary to popular belief, this not only involves downloading content illegally, but also viewing them illegally online. Not very hard to do especially with the amount of content on Youtube, and a whole bunch of other websites that provide easy access to a whole world of stuff online. Before you start panicking about accessing Youtube content the next time, this site is heavily monitored for illegal content, and these are usually taken off pretty fast. But the other websites - not so much.

Why do people resort to piracy? The keyword is FREE content! Now why would someone pay £6.99 to download Mission Impossible III on iTunes (I'm sure it'll get cheaper with time), when it can just as easily be done for free elsewhere. In fact, why bother downloading it at all, when you can just watch it online as many times as you like for free on one of those other websites - saves you money and disc space...win win!!! Same applies to music. Imagine paying £1.00 for a song when you can just download it for free, and a very official version, not just some shady version that doesn't even sound right.

The issue that I'm mostly battling with is the fact that according to the first world countries piracy seems to be a lot more prevalent in the 'developing' economies, mostly in Asia, especially China and India. Ah, now you know what prompted me to even start writing about this topic! Let me start by saying - I don't think that's all that true. To be honest, there is a whole lot of piracy in India, but being the devoted Indians that most of us are, most of the piracy is also restricted to the Indian entertainment industry. We love Bollywood, and everything Bolly, so most rip offs are Hindi songs and movies. I doubt if the television industry is much affected though, I mean seriously, who would want to illegally download and/or watch Kyunki Saans Bhi Kbhi Bahu Thi?! Between the endless reruns and longevity of Indian soaps, the legal television version is intolerable enough...no personal offence to Balaji Telefilms, just my personal opinion! But the movie and music industry is affected hugely.

The strange part is the international entertainment industry claiming loss of legitimate income due to endless piracy in places such as India. Now this may be cliched, but here's my take...and I'll restrict myself to music, but pretty much the same arguments apply to the movies and television sides of the issue as well. First of all we have so much exposure to international music thanks to MTV and Channel V and a whole bunch of other television channels. That's awesome, atleast in the larger cities there's so many youngsters (for the most part) who have an immense exposure and interest in international music as a result, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, we are spoilt for choice with the different types of music and a whole array of artists within each genre.

I think, unfortunately, that is exactly what is the root cause of the problem. Now I may be way behind times, but I'm thinking of 10 years ago (sigh!) when I was in college. My mom was a bit stingy (no major complaints, I still survived!), so my pocket money was restricted to Rs. 500 a month. That had to suffice for most things - travel, food etc. Being a major Westlife fan (I know what you're thinking - there she goes again! My only excuse is that I did warn you a long time ago!!!), my one indulgence in life was making sure that I bought every album of theirs. That's only one album a year, so its not too bad, but imagine saving up from that really measly pocket money for even that! I didn't have an iPod (still don't have one) or any other MP3 player back then, so listening to music was restricted to the confines of home. The height of pinching pennies - I used to buy cassettes all the way through college, until I started working and could afford CD's instead. Believe it nor not, my cassettes are so worn out (yes, I still have them!), that the tape would get stuck every time I'd try to play them. I eventually replaced all my cassettes with CD's, but that was a long time later.

In today's world, its not hard to buy an MP3 player - that's a one time investment. Actually, we don't really even need that anymore, our phones just do the job anyway. But think of the recurring cost of the music. As I mentioned before, a song would cost around £1.00 - translation - $1.50 or Rs. 80. approximately. An album could cost as much as £15.00 when it is first released (that's about 17 songs usually) - again, translation - $22.50 or Rs. 1,200. I'm sure most students get a lot more pocket money now than I used to, but even then, setting aside Rs. 1,200 for some music (all of which you may not even like, but true devotion dictates purchase of an entire album, not just downloading individual songs that we like!) is no mean feat. Add to that the fact that not everyone would restrict themselves to one album a year like I used to. The music industry is so fickle these days that a song is last season before you even manage to memorize the lyrics correctly.

So, on an average, I'd think people would buy an album every two months, and in addition, download atleast five other songs a month. That amounts to an average cost of Rs. 1,000 a month on current music alone. Most of us are also fans of the classics, and because we no longer carry our Walkman around, music going back possibly 40-50 years (I'm thinking The Beatles here) that we used to have on cassettes, we need to redownload those on to our MP3 players/cellphones/laptops as well. We live in the 'Instant' era, and that combined with the 'I Want' culture, obviously no one is going to wait to get their first salary to start buying music. Between all that I have already mentioned, I'm sure the average recurring spend on music is Rs. 1,000 a month. Now our limited pocket money needs to be used for a lot of other things that unfortunately cannot be illegally downloaded - food, clothes etc. I was about to say books, but caught my thoughts in the nick of time!

While, for the most part, Rs. 1,000 a month (that's about Rs. 33 a day) doesn't sound like a very huge spend, but believe me it is a lot of money even in today's world. The poverty line in India is set at Rs. 28 per day (atleast that's what I just read online...pretty cheap I think, I can't imagine surviving on only that much a day in today's expensive world). Which means that the average cost of each person's music is actually the difference between rich and poor for atleast one person. And I'm talking about a person who earns absolutely nothing.

I think the point I'm trying to get to is that pricing international music at the same level for a developing economy is never going to sort the problem. I have only written about music so far. Add to this movies, television, books, software, designer labels, restaurants and the cost of being a normal youngster just keeps spiralling out of control. Honestly, even a developed economy cannot sustain this level of expense.

To the big labels I say this - most people cannot afford to spend so much on entertainment, especially in the face of free alternatives, does that mean we should deprive ourselves of the simplest joy in life - listening to something that gives us such immense pleasure/satisfaction? Do only the rich have a right to feel the rush of a new song? The artists who spew out the music in such abundance are being compensated beyond anyone's dreams. The industry is not exactly making losses either. This money is better utilized elsewhere, except that in all fairness, the people expecting to spend this money are for the most part nowhere near the poverty line. So I guess it just boils down to individual conscience.

A significant portion of the entertainment industry's take is 'Stop Piracy'. I appreciate every artist who has takes the different stand of 'Piracy - Your Choice'. However, for those of us who can afford it, let's not abuse the trust placed in us by our favourite artists. Go legal as much as you can, refrain as much as you can, but I wouldn't judge. My favourite method of restoring balance - give as much as you get. So next time you illegally download a song, feed a starving man on the streets...I think the level of satisfaction from that song will be beyond anything you would have experienced till date. Even the industry should not have much objection to this - its just charity!

PS: I didn't exactly find a place to fit this into my narrative, but its worth mentioning since we are on this context. I remember being at the Times Festival at Bandra in 2010 and had the good fortune of watching Indian Ocean perform. At the end of their section, the lead guy from the band announced that their latest album is available for free download from their official website. His take was something to the effect of 'You guys are going to download it illegally anyway, we might as well give it away for free - have fun!'   :)