"Home taping is killing music". That's what it used to say on album sleeves in the 80s. Of course, it wasn't, and didn't, writes Neil Perry. What it might have killed, had we all got our act together and really concentrated on the home taping, is not music, but the music industry. Big difference.
As a 15-year-old music fan in 1980, I found that the trading of tapes at school was essential to keep up with the latest music. If a friend's older sibling had a band's new album, a tape of it would do the rounds so that we could have a listen before we decided whether to buy it. If you couldn't afford an album, then a cassette copy would serve as a stop-gap until you could (having a band's album on a crappy C60 was never as good as having the real thing, artwork, lyric sheet and all). Then there was the mix tape, the single greatest advancement in the enjoyment of music since the ear. Home taping wasn't killing music. It was responsible for getting more kids into more music than ever before.
Would the music industry have set its lawyers on us back then, if it could have tracked us down and stamped out our evil tape-trading network? Probably. Happily, short of having SWAT teams present in every school playground, they had no way of knowing.
Yet the technology that now enables music fans to swap songs electronically has also finally provided the record companies with a way of tracking down those fans so that they, in league with the British Phonographic Industry, can prosecute 14-year-olds - aka their target audience. The music industry doesn't have a monopoly on greed and stupidity, but you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Over to the BPI's chairman, Peter Jamieson, on this latest proud moment: "We cannot let illegal file sharers off the hook," he said. "They are undermining the legal services, they are damaging music, and they are breaking the law."
One of the great mysteries of the internet age is why the record companies saw it as a threat and not a money-making opportunity. In the late 90s I eagerly looked forward to the moment when the record companies would digitise their entire back catalogues, making the songs available for immediate purchase – no more scouring secondhand record shops or market stalls for that long-lost record.
Instead, after an extended period of simply trying to pretend the internet wasn't happening, the industry declared war on music fans – in effect on itself. It declared war on me, someone who's not in the pirating business but merely a sap who's spent a significant chunk of his monthly income for the past two decades on buying vinyl, CDs and gig tickets. The sort of person who keeps the music industry ticking over very nicely, thank you. The sort of person who, according to BPI figures, in 2004 helped the record companies celebrate their best-ever year for album sales. The sort of person who sometimes "illegally" downloads songs to see if I want to purchase any more music by that band.
Many music fans who would willingly pay for songs are forced into illegal downloads because there is no other option. A music fan cannot live on iTunes alone. But is the music industry going to listen to us, or carry on trying to punish us?
