There’s a great post at New Music Strategies by Andrew Dubber about piracy in the music business (hat tip : Derek Sivers).

I share Dubber’s opinion that making copies of songs or records for friends, putting a copy on your hard drive, making your own mixtape-style recordable CDs for a road trip… these things are legally acknowledged as unauthorized duplication, but fall far short of actual piracy.

The problem with many laws that deal with issues of an intellectual nature, whether they be intellectual property laws or hate crime legislation, is there’s no possible way to infer the thoughts of the accused. The only way to effectively evaluate a person’s motives is to judge their actions. With the piracy of music, the law should simply go after those who seek to illegally profit from legitimate artists and the publishers of recorded music, and should not go after those whose actions are, in fact, attempting to be supportive of a particular artist or band by telling others about their music.

But really, as an unknown or new artist, even if your hot new CD is copied and handed out at every bar and club in town, you should be embracing this kind of sharing - it’s needed to help you grow to a size where piracy might have an actual, quantifiable negative impact on your bottom line.

And hey, when your bottom line is practically zero anyway, you should be allowing all forms of file sharing and CD burning in an effort to get your music out to as many people as possible while building your brand.

From Dubber’s post (re: the scale needed to make piracy profitable) :

If I scan the artwork, set up a mass CD replication production process, manufacture cheap copies of the CD and then distribute and sell the album for financial gain, then that’s piracy. Which is bad and wrong.

Now, simple economics would suggest that if I was going to invest capital in a mass replication process, then it would be U2 and their like that I would want to be mass replicating. The value of the hit, to the actual pirate, is much greater than the value of the non-hit.

So the short answer to the question about whether you should even give piracy a second thought is: Are you U2?

Few bands are “U2,” of course.

“Unauthorized duplication” is critical to the success of any new band or artist. It’s a shame we can’t allow for the free flow of information and ideas (file sharing and CD swapping) without some selfish idiots taking advantage of that freedom and ruining it, in the name of greed, for the rest of us.

“Negotiating the new media environment” is, indeed, the best path forward if you’re a band or singer/songwriter interested in making a career out of your love for music.

Embrace unauthorized duplication… you should be so lucky to grow to such a size that pirates want to profit from your hard work.