Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

Yuval Cohen gets it. A lot of people don’t yet understand that it’s not as simple as “piracy.” What we’re facing is a complete and total shift in the way people find and listen to music.

A couple of weeks later my father gave me a ride in his car. He is very conservative and buys almost all of his music. He had Jacques Brel (bought); Pavarotti, (bought); Cat Stevens (bought) and Don McLean (bought). Still, when I opened his CD case I saw Gigliola Cinquetti, burned; “War of the Worlds” soundtrack, burned; a collection of songs he likes, burned.

This blew my mind. So he explained it to me simply. “I couldn’t find Cinquetti’s album anywhere and I had ‘War of the Worlds’ on LP but threw my record player out years ago. I will not pay for twelve different CDs in which I like only one song. I wouldn’t have bought them anyways.”

Cohen goes on to articulate what we should’ve have known all along:

The music and software industries fight a battle against “piracy,” because they KNOW that in order to survive they will HAVE to raise their standards, release only GOOD software, and make music collections that will be CHEAP and CUSTOMIZED…in order to compete in a much harder marketplace everybody will need to do their best to sell every single album (or piece of software) — for less pay in return.

There’s that pay cut again. Staring ahead into the future, being a rock star signed to a major doesn’t seem so lucrative.