Sunday, March 16, 2008

In Mumbai Waiting for a Miracle

A friend of mine sent me a link to this song called 'In Mumbai Waiting for a Miracle', sung by Raghu Dixit. Its a super cool song! Check out their latest album here. You can actually listen to some of the songs online...If you like them, buy the album and don't just pirate it from a friend.

At IITK, had a nice & enlightening discussion on the wrongs of piracy, with Shreyas and other folks from IITK. It is true that we all want the music/movie we like for free. So, without any feeling of guilt we copy this stuff from a friend, buy pirated copies, etc. But we must not undermine the ordeal an artist goes through in creating a music album or a movie. As Shreyas rightly said, many small artists rely on the sales of the albums for livelihood. It costs lakhs of rupees to create a very simplistic music album...and it then hurts to find out that people are simply making umpteen number of copies of the album and rotating it around...where will the money come from?

It is true that it is quite tough to prevent piracy. But the least we can do is instill a sense of guilt among people who very actively do it. It should be looked upon as a social gaffe...only then can we expect atleast the elite and the educated to give up on it!

On this topic, if you have not checked out radioverve yet, go and do it right away !!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with the idea of not pirating and buying original. But most of the times, people are just interested in one or two songs from the album, and it doesn't make economical sense to buy the whole album. So more than instilling a sense of guilt, a more progressive move would be to enable people to pay for what they want. Use technology when it is available.

These days, with internet connection being ubiquitous, the Music labels should be able to deliver music online, like how itunes does!

We have such a site for indian songs. Check out http://www.hummaa.com

You can listen to the streaming songs, and if you like them, you can buy them! in indian rupees. The songs are priced from Rs.5 to Rs.20. Now, Howzzat?

Anki said...

Well I agree with you that yes for a few songs, why should I buy the whole album?! but have you thought on similar lines for a book for short stories? ie a compilation of short stories? There, some stories are good and some are bad..but in that case we can't just buy those particular stories..but yes nowadays with internet penetration, we can manage to obtain the softcopy of the book. But for sure it is not going to be viable going forward.

But yes, I like the idea...but there again, if a person can just stream and listen to the song, why would he/she buy it untill he realizes that he/she is doing something wrong? If its right in their eyes, they will continue to listen to it online. So, here again, each one of us realize/nuderstand that 'that is wrong'!

Anonymous said...

@anki
I prefer listening to music on my ipod. Music exists to be carried around. so, i wouldn't worry much about people who keep listening to music streaming it online. They will be paying for it through their bandwidth costs.

That brings me to another good idea. What if internet service providers like BSNL, Satyam could be charged for any small transactions that we do online, and later they charge it back to us?!