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Music Piracy

The term piracy is generally used to describe the deliberate infringement of copyright on a commercial scale. It is illegal and criminal in nature. Music piracy basically refers to three kinds of activities:
• Counterfeiting - The copying of the sound as well as artwork, trademark, label and packaging of the original recording, with an aim to mislead the consumer into thinking that they are buying the genuine product.
• Pirate Recording - The unauthorized duplication of music from legitimate recordings for commercial gain. Pirated CDs or music cassettes may be compilations or combination of hit titles of different music companies. Unlike a counterfeit product, the packing and presentation of a pirate copy is usually not a replica of the legitimate commercial release.
• Bootlegging - The recording, duplication and sale of a live concert or broadcast without the permission of the artiste or the music company which has the recording rights for the artistes performances.

Those involved in music piracy range from owners of big recording facilities to small shops with a single music system, which is used to record songs that the customers ask for. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a worldwide trade association for the music industry that identifies and attempts to solve problems of piracy, sales of pirate recordings were $ 2.1 billion in 1995. This represented unauthorized sales of 954 million music cassettes, 84 million CDs and 4 million LPs - indicating that one in every five recordings sold worldwide was a pirated copy. India was the world's third largest pirate market in volume and sixth in value. The Indian music industry lost millions of rupees each year to the pirates. Of the nearly 580 million cassettes sold in the year 1997, 175 million were illegally manufactured and sold by pirates. The pirates evade payment of royalty, excise duty and sales tax and also they do not have to incur the promotion and publicity costs. Piracy levels were as high as 90 % in the early 1980s, coming down to 65% in the 1990s and to 40% in 2000.

T-Series & Music Piracy

Gulshan's father Chandrabhan and his family moved to Delhi from West Punjab in 1947. The family members began selling fruit on the roads and within a few years, earned enough money to establish a small fruit juice shop. Chandrabhan later started selling pre-recorded music by opening a record shop. In the early 1970s, Gulshan began looking after the music business and named it Super Cassettes.

By 2000, T-Series had become a $ 90 million group with a presence in the Consumer Electronics (color television, fans), CDs (12 million CDs per annum), Audio/Video Magnetic tapes and cassettes (186 million cassettes per annum) and mineral water businesses. The company had rights to over 2000 video and 18,000 audio titles, comprising of nearly 24,000 hours of music software. T-Series had a technical collaboration with Hyundai of Japan for its color television venture.

This meteoric rise of T-Series was termed by analysts⁴ as 'a story of avarice, greed and cunning and the clash of two mafias - one represented by Gulshan and the other by those whom he damaged.'

In the 1970s, the Indian music industry was dominated by GCI and Polydor (later named Music India Ltd.- MIL), which sold only expensive LP records through a few record shops. These companies did not set up facilities to manufacture cassettes on a large scale. Since cassette players were not very common in the country at that time, GCI and Polydor were happy offering cassettes in small numbers at very high prices.

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4] Life in the twilight zone, www.rediff.com, September 2, 1997.