Ethical Issues in the Music Industry Response to Innovation and Piracy

Ethical Issues in the Music Industry Response to Innovation and Piracy

Robert F. Easley
311 Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556-5646
voice: 574.631.6077
facsimile: 574.631.5255
email: reasley@nd.edu

Robert F. Easley is an associate professor of Management Information Systems in the
Management Department at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame.

Abstract
The current conflict between the recording industry and a portion of its customers who are
involved in illicit copying of music files arose from innovations involving the compression and
electronic distribution of files over the internet. This paper briefly describes some of the
challenges faced by the recording industry, and examines some of the ethical issues that arise in
various industry and consumer responses to the opportunities and threats presented by these
innovations. The paper concludes by highlighting the risks associated with responses that
threaten further innovation, ultimately reducing the chances of finding solutions that hold appeal
for all parties.

Keywords: disruptive innovation, music piracy, recording industry

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Ethical Issues in the Music Industry Response to Innovation and Piracy

Introduction
For several years now the recording industry has been battling music piracy, primarily by going
after software and website developers, as well as consumers, in the courts. This may be holding
back the evolution of the music industry towards an ultimately beneficial embrace of the
possibilities inherent in electronic distribution of music. Yet the history of industry response to
innovation generally suggests that this effort is likely to fail, and some research suggests that the
music industry has more to gain than to lose from embracing many of the innovations it is
currently battling. This paper examines some of the ethical issues that arise in responding to
innovations that are perceived to be threatening, in particular with respect to music piracy.

The Difficulties Inherent in Responding to Innovation
There is a long history of research on the response of industry to threatening innovations, going
back to Schumpeter’s gales of competitive destruction (Schumpeter, 1947). Eric von Hippel
(1988), for example, argues that examining the source of innovation is important to determining
what advantage, if any, may be gained from it. He classifies innovations as originating from one
of three sources: a manufacturer, supplier or user; and emphasizes a key distinction between
innovation by firms and suppliers who must market the innovation to profit from it, and
innovation by users who must, on the contrary, guard their innovation as a trade secret to obtain
any advantage. A particular challenge in responding to the innovations that are fundamentally
altering the competitive landscape for e-business is that they can, in some cases, arise from other
sources. Consider the case of standards adopted by organizations such as the Motion Picture

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Expert Group (MPEG) which developed technical standards for audio and video signal
compression. This standard was then implemented in software made freely available to users,
requiring virtually no marketing effort for that benefit to be obtained, with the published standard
precluding any possibility of trade secrecy. The audio version of the standard, commonly known
as MP3, allowed music files to be reduced in size to the point that they could easily be copied
over internet connections. This quickly led to services such as Napster that offered simple ways
for internet users to share their music collections online, a development that the recording
industry is still struggling to address.
Christensen (1997) suggests that innovations from unusual sources may be more likely to
become disruptive technologies. His explanation for the lack of interest in disruptive
technologies, on the part of market leaders, fits the initial recording industry response to MP3
very well:
… the conclusion by established companies that investing aggressively in
disruptive technologies is not a rational financial decision for them to make, has
three bases. First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally
promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies
typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And
third, leading firms' most profitable customers generally don't want, and indeed
initially can't use, products based on disruptive technologies. (Christensen, 1997:
xvii)

Christensen’s central point is that firms that ignore disruptive technologies, despite the fact that
they do so for perfectly good reasons, can suffer severe consequences if they are left behind
when the market moves en masse to a new technology. But it is instructive to examine each of
his three points in the context of the music industry’s response to internet-based music piracy.

First, it is clear that the major threat to record labels posed by electronic distribution of
music is to their margins. Consumers, who learned through burning their own CD’s that the cost
of producing a CD was just a few cents, are now aware that the marginal cost of distributing an

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electronic copy of a compressed version of the same music approaches zero. There is no
packaging, there is no CD, only the digital file. Clearly this puts pressure on the consumer’s
expectation of a reasonable product price. As Shapiro and Varian (1999) point out:
In our experience, information providers with established brand names often
hesitate to drop prices quickly enough to warn off potential entrants, perhaps
because they think their brand name shields them from competition. Sure a
valuable brand name will allow you to command some premium, but it will not
guarantee you the same prices or margins you enjoyed before new information
technologies arrived that caused per-copy and distribution costs to fall.

The record labels are perhaps even exceptional in their resistance to dropping prices in response
to reduced costs, having settled a lawsuit launched in 2000 by a group of 40 states (led by none
other than Eliot Spitzer), by agreeing to “refund $67.4 million to consumers who purchased CD's
from 1995 to 2000 and eliminate policies that set minimum prices for advertised CD's” (Deutsch,
2002). So their resistance to dropping prices as a way to respond to this innovation is not
surprising.

An important corollary is that there is clear evidence of a willingness to pay for online
music in general, via legal download services. There is even some indirect evidence that those
who download pirated copies also exhibit a willingness to pay. Jeff Tweedy, front man of the
group Wilco, describes an example in an interview with Wired news (Jardin, 2004):
We were contacted by fans who were excited about the fact that they found
[copies of A Ghost Is Born] on P2P networks, but wanted to give something back
in good faith. They wanted to send money to express solidarity with the fact that
we'd embraced the downloading community. We couldn't take the money
ourselves, so they asked if we could pick a charity instead -- we pointed them to
Doctors Without Borders, and they ended up receiving about $15,000.

Apple’s iPod service is probably the best known of the legal download services, and it has
quickly established a price of $.99 per title. Legal downloads are growing, with offerings such
as Connect from Sony, and Microsoft recently entering with their own product, though online
sales now account for only 5% of industry revenues (Economist, 2004). The $.99 price offers

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savings to consumers who are no longer forced to buy a bundled set of tracks in album form, and
it is sufficient for record labels to get their usual fees from the sale without having to actually
produce a physical product and distribute it. It is unclear whether this price will hold, as
competition increases in online sales. Already iPod is experimenting with other types of
bundles, such as an offering U2’s entire catalog (16 albums, 400 tracks) for $150 (Kahney &
Dean, 2004).
Second, the internet was an emerging market whose significance, in the early days of
music piracy at least, was still being determined. Easley, Michel & Devaraj (2003) present
evidence supporting the notion that exposure to music piracy actually played a role in pushing
record labels: to adopt internet technologies (those exposed to piracy were more likely to be
early adopters of internet technology), to create richer and more fully-featured web sites, and to
experiment with electronic forms of distribution that are either proprietary or in other ways non-
threatening (e.g., short clips of songs). These results also tie in nicely with recent theories of
innovation for net-enabled organizations from the Information Systems literature (e.g.,
Sambamurthy 2003, Wheeler 2002) that put forth frameworks in which music piracy could be
argued to play the critical role of informing the record labels of the importance of a key new
distribution technology.
With this newly emerging market, the greatest threats to the existing record label business
model come from a number of directions. First there is the loss of value for their existing
economies of scale for production of the physical products, the CD’s themselves. Even in
electronic format, there is a loss of control of the format, with many efforts to establish copy-
protected formats failing to attract the critical mass of users necessary to attract device makers.
Then there is the threat to their existing distribution channels and control of those channels.

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Channel control was one of the issues in the settlement of the price fixing lawsuit mentioned
above, where the labels allegedly went too far in exerting control over pricing via distribution
channel agreements. The next lawsuit from Eliot Spitzer targeting the record labels is said to
involve marketing channels, and will focus on the practice of channeling “payola” through
intermediaries to control playlists at radio stations (Leeds, 2004). It is somewhat ironic that
record labels may be sued for paying to control radio playlists while they, at the same time, are
suing to prevent the viral marketing of perhaps the very same music through internet file sharing.

It is Christensen’s third point, however, which the music industry seems perhaps to have
missed completely. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing the
record labels, has asserted forcefully and repeatedly that music piracy is costing it record sales.
Yet there are others who might suggest they are ignoring the benefits of a massive, free viral
marketing campaign. As Jeff Tweedy from Wilco explains (Jardin, 2004),
We live in a connected world now. Some find that frightening. If people are
downloading our music, they're listening to it. The internet is like radio for us.

After releasing their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, for free over the internet, Wilco then released
it under a new label, Nonesuch, and it debuted higher on the charts than any of their previous
albums. Even an internal study by one of the major labels found that piracy accounted for at
most a third of the recent drop in sales (Economist, 2004), with much of the rest attributed to
competition for consumer interest from DVDs and video games, or even an admitted decline in
the quality of musical acts. Independent researchers of the music industry, such as Oberholzer
and Strumpf (2004) who study availability of music online and record sales, are not able to find
any significant connection between downloading and the drop in sales. As Schwarz (2004)
describes Oberholzer-Gee’s explanation
"Say I offer you a free flight to Florida," he asks. "How likely is it that you will go
to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free." If there were no free ticket,

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that trip to Florida would be much less likely, he said. Similarly, free music might
draw all kinds of people, but "it doesn't mean that these people would buy CD's at
$18"

To add a more general perspective to the issue, Shapiro and Varian (1999, p. 97) address the
trade off between protection of intellectual property and ultimate profitability, saying
We think the natural tendency is for producers to worry too much about
protecting their intellectual property. The important thing is to maximize the
value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection. If
you lose a little of your property when you sell it or rent it, that’s just a cost of
doing business, along with depreciation, inventory losses, and obsolescence.


One could argue that maximizing the value of intellectual property requires different
strategies in different market segments. For example some research has found little piracy in
classical music (Easley et al, 2004), where there is still a cultivated nostalgia for “bootlegged”
recordings that, though illegal, caught certain performers at their prime1. There are also record
labels, such as those catering to older audiences, which have not experienced trouble with piracy,
since the CD format is preferred by their customers. But there is clearly a market segment –
especially the dominant market for hit music targeting teenage audiences – that experiences
extensive piracy. It is here that further innovation will be required, perhaps along the lines of
Apple’s iPod business model or others as yet untested, to address the market tensions that
underlie ethically questionable behaviors on both sides, for it is in exactly this demographic that
we would expect new distribution models to take hold or new markets to emerge.

Ethical Considerations

So in this conflict, on one side there is a segment of music consumers that illegally
download pirated music files. Though it is not clear that this activity results in reduced sales,
some portion of these “pirates” may be willing to pay for legal downloads at a reasonable price.

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On the other side there are the record labels, who have settled multimillion dollar lawsuits
alleging price fixing, who cling to high margins despite the obvious savings in electronic
distribution, and who in turn sue their own customers who are found to have downloaded pirated
music files.
I believe there are a number of interesting ethical questions that can be framed from this
conflict. One involves the behavior of those who share music files, making them available and
downloading them. While this is clearly illegal2, is it unethical to pirate the music? The
widespread acceptance of this activity, at least in some segments of the population, suggests that
this is seen as something more akin to recording a song off the radio than stealing a CD from a
record store. Some argue that this is a form of civil disobedience designed to protest the
excessive scope of copyright protections, and attendant limits on distribution and price gouging
(Lunney, 2001). There are even cases of encouraging civil disobedience in downloading as a
way of honoring civil disobedience in social justice movements, as in the recent case of the illicit
free distribution of Eyes on the Prize, a 14-part documentary on the civil rights movement that is
not currently in distribution due to copyright problems (Dean, 2005). As for the record labels,
they surely have the right – and even the obligation to their shareholders – to maximize the value
of the copyrights they hold. However, it is also reasonable to ask if it is ethical to sue their own
customers in an attempt to slow down or stop an innovation that is likely to bring about a social
good, especially given their history of legal troubles with price-fixing and payola. Granted the
social good of wider and more efficient distribution comes at the expense of legitimate payments
for royalties and performance, but it may nonetheless be questionable to ignore the marketing
benefits that may accrue from such exposure, or the emerging markets that may actually benefit
from such developments.

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I don’t intend to try to answer these questions here, but first wish to consider an
admittedly limited yet informative parallel. Pharmaceutical companies that have developed and
manufacture HIV drugs have major R&D expenses that must be recovered at some stage.
Record labels often cite the risks involved in the development of new talent as a major expense
that needs to be recouped. For both record labels and pharmaceuticals, marketing expenses
undertaken to develop demand for products form a large portion of the expenses they seek to
recoup through higher margins. Yet each offers a product whose marginal cost of production is
extremely low relative to the market price, attracting piracy in the form of illegal downloading or
unlicensed generic manufacture.
The parallel breaks down of course when you consider the client side, which in one case
involves life-or-death needs that support a number of arguments for ethical violation of patent
protection. But given the very seriousness of the HIV crisis, it is instructive to look at some of
the ideas that have emerged to handle this conflict, such as compulsory licensing, described for
example by Doctors without Borders (Berman & Ford, 1999). Fisher (2004) discusses this as a
possible solution for the music industry, where one could imagine a system that compensates
music labels for downloads using compulsory licenses, based on the notion of music as a public
good:
… a small number of socially valuable products and services have the following
two related characteristics: First, they are “nonrivalrous.” In other words,
enjoyment of them by one person does not prevent enjoyment of them by other
persons. Second, they are “nonexcludable.” In other words, once they have been
made available to one person, it is impossible or at least difficult to prevent other
people from gaining access to them. Goods that share these features are likely to
be produced at socially suboptimal levels. Why? Because potential suppliers of
them […] recognize that they would not be able to recover from consumers the
costs of producing them.


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Though both pharmaceuticals and record labels may resist the characterization of their products
as public goods, wishing to retain the full power accorded to them by their patent or copyright
protections, it may nonetheless be reasonable to curtail that power if it would result in a greater
social good. This approach has potential at least to preserve the incentives to create music, or in
the case of record labels, to acquire and promote it. While there are legitimate concerns raised
by the prospect of excessive government or regulatory intervention, there is at least equal cause
for concern that governments may err on the side of strengthening copyright protections in a
manner that would thwart the development of innovative solutions (Lee, 2004). Voluntary
licensing is another alternative that has begun to take root at college campuses that have
purchased campus-wide rights to the now legal Napster file-sharing service (Rafael and
Anderson, 2004).
A key consideration, going back to the earlier discussion of innovation, is that we cannot
predict what new markets may emerge, and what new ways of profiting from copyright may
appear. Lee (2004) provides a clear summary of the Sony betamax case, in which the movie
industry tried unsuccessfully to prevent the sale of video cassette recorders due to their potential
use for copyright violation. Had the movie industry won, it would have prevented development
of a video rental market that now, for many films, exceeds the value of the theatre box office.
Though it is possible in some cases to identify technologies that are less likely to lead to piracy
issues, in this case the betamax clearly was capable of copyright infringement, and yet led to
development of a hugely profitable enterprise for those opposing its release in the market. This
underscores the strategic importance of building on innovations that attract consumers with new
products and services that may lead to unanticipated profit opportunities.

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