What is the impact of music piracy amid a pandemic? Cody Blakely is a local musician and recording engineer who has seen firsthand impacts. Cody Blakely is a local musician and recording engineer who has seen the effects of the pandemic firsthand, from finances to live music to a lack of both.

This Corona pandemic has also put music at the media forefront. This includes getting music online from streaming and illegal services and encouraging a conversation on music piracy.

Music piracy amid a pandemic; Interview with Cody Blakely

Below is an interview between Blakely and Dylanna Fisher from Switching Styles.

Do you think Covid-19 has impacted the conversation about pirated or downloaded music?

I get it. It would be foolish to assume everyone has extra money they can spend buying records. I haven’t purchased a record myself in a while, and I subscribe to a streaming service. I am not exactly helping the situation, but I also feel like I buy a lot of music right from the bands.

Plus, with record shops closed down or limited access, it’s tough to acquire music. It’s a tough situation. Some people haven’t felt a loss in income and if they can help support a local band by buying some of their merchandise, it would mean the world to them.

But I don’t think people understand exactly how much money musicians invest into their own music or how much money is invested. I say money, but also, at the same time, becoming a musician that people care about is not an easy thing.

Even if pirating wasn’t the thing, I still don’t think there’d be a tremendous amount of wealth shared with the artists.

Why do you think that kind of sentiment exists in the music industry?

When people do not understand how a record deal works versus a movie studio or anything like that, they will be making billions of dollars potentially off of a movie where you and I both know what a record is. The amount of record sales that it’s actually going to take for the artist to make a profit, is it you need to sell like at least eight times what the value or how much you invested into the record just for anybody to make money.

But when it comes to music, it’s almost like people the wallets immediately put away And I’ve never personally understood why. I’m the furthest thing from a social expert but it’s definitely something that I’ve noticed, and I hope that it goes away, record sales are back up with vinyl. But how many people are shopping, right from the band or going to a record store and purchasing vinyl? Either way, most of the money’s just going to go back to the label and not back to the artists.

One thing that a lot of artists that I’ve talked to mention is ways that online music services can help. Watch it or listen to music on Spotify.

What are your thoughts on that?

Streaming services are an incredible discovery tool. We can all think of a band we had no idea existed before. And then when Spotify or whatever streaming service you use came into play, the amount of music we’re able to consume is overwhelming, almost, especially considering where we are in Edmonton. It’s no, it’s no secret that we’re not a major tour stop.

That’s the best way to discover bands. And if you discover a band you like, reach out to them and ask them to buy some of their merch. It happens all the time where we’ll have people from like Poland discovering us. We’ve said that merch overseas before, and it’s extremely appreciated.

Why would you want music lovers and musicians to kind of know about the topic?

I think the important thing to realize is that even with standard 12-point deals, the artist’s record will usually need to make eight times what the budget is for making the record, just for the artist to receive a penny worth of royalties.

I just don’t think that there’s enough education that goes into exactly how much goes into making a record. The lack of education is a big one. That’s not just with music lovers; musicians are as well. There need to be better resources for them to understand how much they should be investing in their own music as well if they want it to be commercially accepted.

What kind of resources?

Alberta music that’s kind of the first one. If you want to know the information, it’s easy to find on the internet. There are many sources out there.

[Check out some financial aids for Canadian Musicians]

From my experience, people need to take a little bit more initiative and perhaps create education for those musicians. You can Google for an hour, and the amount of information you’ll learn is astonishing. Oh, well.

People do not have extra spending cash if they’ve been laid off. It is going to affect pirating music. I mean, there’s still there are still records coming out. And if you’re not part of a streaming service, the only way you can really listen to that now is to pirate everything. I understand, And I am sensitive to that, that there I don’t think that there’s a single record out there where it’s missing all your bills. I totally respect and understand that.

There are a lot of bands that are starting to stream them, play shows, and whatnot. I think there are a lot of steps in the right direction. , and until, there’s going to be a lot more people normally losing their income. It’s going to it might be the norm for a bit, unfortunately.

Streaming services before COVID-19 were Increasing quite amazingly, it seems to have kind of plateaued, not decrease, not increase just stayed the same. Right after COVID-19, What do you estimate will happen with streaming services?

Wow, that’s a really good question.

It’s always more of a discovery tool. I can’t see a way for streaming services to get any bigger. Even TV streaming services, and they’re in the same boat, have plateaued as well. I don’t necessarily see them getting any bigger. There’s only so much you can do with a streaming service. Please be my guest if you’re using it as a discovery tool. But at the end of the day, if you want music to join and new music to be made, invest in it.

If you have somewhere like Starlite Room, for example, that’s hosting multiple 500-plus shows a week, bringing that money downtown. People coming from out of town and bringing money into Edmonton to let something like that go, while we’re investing in pipelines that are still not going to go through,  is incredibly short-sighted. That’s pretty much how you turn Alberta into a corporation.

Why is that?

The big thing that I find is that a lot of people, we can just be honest, a lot of people in Alberta. And it very, very quickly becomes something that people need to realize that it does no matter what you do. Everything about your life is going to be affected by some sort of art. Whether you’re watching TV, watching a movie, wherever you’re, throwing on the radio, the clothes you wear were made by a designer. Even if you’re watching the Oilers play, someone had to design that logo for people to overlook the arts as not a major industry just because it wasn’t anything that you could drive your car with or anything like that. It’s not oil.

Comment below your thoughts about Music piracy amid a pandemic, our musicians!!