Unit 4 Work In Progress Post: Illegal Music Downloading

For my final project, I will be writing a rhetorical analysis on the subject of illegal music downloading. Nowadays, if you ask a room full of college kids, “have you ever downloaded music illegally?”, more than half of them will raise their hands. If you ask them if they still continue to do it, many of them will put their hands down, but will be lying. We conducted this exact experiment in my Intro to Music Industry class and got these exact results. Three months ago, before I took this class, I downloaded illegal music all the time, never worrying about it too much since so many people did it. Now, since I have almost completed this class, I have learned about the serious implications that go along with illegal music downloading.

In my project, I will be looking at illegal music downloading from a psychological perspective and from a marketing perspective. In Music Industry class, we learned a lot about the consequences that go along with illegal music downloading. We learned about the payment process, and how little most people get paid for music downloads. For example, songwriters will write a smash hit for a huge pop star, but somehow will still be frantically trying to pay their mortgage bills. Why? Because on one download of a song, they usually make less than one cent. This information pulled on my heart strings a bit. Someone just like me was struggling with their finances because I didn’t want to pay $1.29 for a song. Many other people have felt this way too, so that is why I will look at a psychological perspective on illegal music downloading. What people also don’t realize is that it’s not just songwriters losing money from illegal downloads but it’s also all the people who put the time and money into marketing song and album releases. This is why I will also look at a marketing perspective, in order to bring to light the struggles the music marketing companies are having in competing with illegal downloading. Hopefully, my paper will help my readers realize that this everyday occurrence has serious repercussions and that they will begin to help people like us by stopping the illegal downloading and start buying music.