Did the music industry win the war against big tech?

Making the pages of the NME in summer 2004 remains a highlight of my career

Hard to believe it but it’s now twenty years since the BPI started its communications campaign to deter illegal music downloading.

I'll write more about this one day but broadly the strategy was;

1 / prove that illegal downloading is bad for artists

2 / do what we can to raise consumer awareness

3 / find a way to prove the law applies online

4 / enforce the law in test cases, minimise reputation damage

It was the first mainstream campaign the organisation had launched since the disastrous and lampooned Home Taping Is Killing Music and the context wasn't ideal...

🚀 CD album sales were actually growing in the UK
🎓 a much-cited ‘Harvard’ study had suggested filesharing boosted sales
🤬 loads of negative publicity after a 13-year-old was sued in the US
🤖 the tech sector was lobbying hard against us
🎤 as were many within the music industry
💩 legal music services were not very good
⚖️ the law had yet to be proven in the UK courts.

So it was not without its challenges.

I became the main spokesperson over the following years, and learned a lot. 

We could have done some things differently, but mostly I feel the organisation ran the campaign very well.

Part of the strategy was that we would always turn up for the media - fielding spokespeople at any opportunity to fight our corner - however difficult and potentially hostile the context.

This included me attending a round table ‘debate’ at the NME, with an artist (Blur’s Dave Rowntree), a legal music service (the newly-relaunched and licenced Napster) and a student.

So where are we now?

CDs are now a legacy product. But twenty years on, many millions of people now pay for digital music. After hitting rock-bottom around 2013, streaming subscriptions went mainstream and the recorded music business is back to its late 90s peak in terms of revenue.

It was able to do this only because it won the big argument: it normalised the idea that music should be paid for, and can’t be stolen at will by big tech.