Spears, Madonna, Other Stars in TV Ads on Piracy
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Pop princess Britney Spears, the bubbly dancing spokesgirl for Pepsi, will soon be hawking again but on a more serious note in a commercial to warn people of the evils of online piracy.
Spears, rapper Nelly, hip-hop diva Missy Elliott and other pop stars will be featured in coming weeks in TV spots funded by the world’s biggest record labels to educate people about illegal downloading of music, which the music industry blames for a protracted sales slump.
After falling more than 5 percent in 2001, CD shipments dropped another 7 percent in the first half of this year as illegal downloading of music persists at high levels.
Industry estimates show that more than 2.6 billion music files are downloaded illegally from the Internet each month, mainly through unlicensed “peer-to-peer” services.
“We want to hit fans with the message that downloading music illegally is, as Britney Spears explains in one of the spots, ‘the same thing as going into a CD store and stealing the CD,”‘ said Hilary Rosen, chief executive officer of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group for the music industry.
“Too many people don’t realize that when you download a song you like from a peer-to-peer network or some other unauthorized Internet source, what you’re doing is stealing music,” she said.
The TV ads will be shown at a congressional hearing in Washington on piracy Thursday, but will not be aired for a few weeks. The print portion of the campaign will be launched Thursday with full-page ads in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and publications like Roll Call aimed at lawmakers.
The print ads ask the question, “Who Really Cares About Illegal Downloading?,” then answer it with a diverse list of nearly 90 major recording artists and songwriters, including such superstars as Eminen, Madonna, the Dixie Chicks, Missy Elliott, Elton John, Sting, Phil Collins, Luciano Pavarotti, Brian Wilson, Spears, and Natalie Cole.
The campaign is the brainchild of an alliance of several recording, publishing, musician trade groups known as Music United for Strong Internet Copyright (MUSIC) Coalition.
The group includes the RIAA — which represents industry giants like Bertelsmann AG BMG, EMI Group Plc, AOL Time Warner Inc., Vivendi Universal and Sony Corp. — the Association for Independent Music, American Federation of Musicians, Christian Music Trade Association and several others.
The campaign is the industry’s latest effort to discourage illegal trading and sharing of music made popular by Napster, which at its peak attracted tens of millions of music fans.
While the labels succeeded in idling Napster through copyright litigation, the once popular song-swap service exposed an entire generation of youths to the concept of file-trading, leaving in its wake a more powerful crop of imitators including Morpheus MusicCity, Grokster and Kazaa.
In addition to pursuing these services in court, the labels have resorted to a method known as “spoofing” on the free peer-to-peer services and are also mulling lawsuits against individual song-swappers.
With “spoofing,” the labels hire companies to distribute “decoy” files that are empty or do not work in order to frustrate would-be downloaders of movies and music.
Some analysts see these methods ultimately working. “File-transferers are the ones who are going to migrate to paid subscription services,” said Lee Black, analyst with Jupiter Media. “The disadvantage that come with peer-to-peer services, like bad or bogus files, will ultimately drive people to subscription services,” he said.
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