A culture of thievery in the music business

Though I've never been in the music business myself I've accumulated (by some coincidence) some revealing first-hand anecdotes from people I met who were.

I will redact names here to avoid implicating the 'revealers' but I will just say that any Australian would definitely recognise every participant involved here (if I was to name them). Maybe I need some kind of private part of the site to talk about this stuff that won't show up in search engines, but either way this will suffice for now.

The pre-famous singer-songwriter

Somewhere in the mid-late 2000s I was shooting video at a corporate retreat-type event for which there was a solo singer/guitarist performing. I had no idea who he was at the time — he was just an unassuming guy who showed up with an acoustic guitar and his manager.

While shooting the guy perform to a small crowd I remarked to his manager that he was really good. The manager agreed and told me that he was about to be a huge star. At the time I took this as necessary optimism on the part of the manager (based on the singer's talent) but today I would suspect that he was referring to it being a 'done deal' — that the marketing machine had been set in motion and this guy was going to be made famous regardless.

I'm not sure what the point was for him to be doing small gigs at corporate events (it was some countryside retreat for management of a mega-corp) but the guy was friendly and polite. Was this training or warm-up preparation for his impending intensive touring schedule? I couldn't say, but sure enough it was barely a couple of years later that his first popular single hit massively worldwide, and the manager's 'premonition' came true.

Label-approved song stealing

The interesting part was when the singer-songwriter was chatting with a small group of us in a green room of sorts, between his performances. He seemed somewhat jaded about the music business, which I thought was strange for a guy who was still a 'nobody' at that point.

He talked about how one half of an (already famous) Australian electronic-music duo had literally copied an entire hard drive of original composed music from his (producer) roommate while he was away on holiday.

When the roommate finished producing the tracks and took them to a meeting at the (biggest of the big) label to demo them, the exec told him that he'd already heard these tracks. The electronic music duo (who were already signed with them) had recorded their vocals over the top and the album was on its way to distribution.

The label apparently didn't care in the slightest that their artists were blatantly stealing work, and they had no intention of pulling the album — they were already too invested and thought the image/package of the duo etc worked. What the label offered the victim was a record deal of his own, in order to (at least in part) compensate him for what had been taken. As part of this contract he would agree to not pursue or publicly talk about what the duo had done to him. Everyone wins (kind of).

I don't know the name of that producer roommate, so couldn't say whether he ended up making a success of his own career, but the duo are still big names and releasing albums to this day (I just googled it). How much of it is their own work I have no idea.

The dynamic at play

It would seem bizarre to the Disney-raised 'civilian' world that someone could blatantly steal work (from a friend no-less), get caught red-handed, and then suffer zero real-world consequences for it, but it appears that this is the nature of the game in circles like these.

The label was obviously already happy with and invested in promoting the duo, so it makes logical sense that they would not want to derail that train just to 'do the right thing'.

The thieving duo would have to have known they were eventually going to get caught — the roommate would inevitably end up hearing the tracks when the album got released — so was it just dumb luck that they got away with it, or did they somehow know that they'd get away with it?

If you think about it, the only thing that ultimately stops this kind of behaviour, is if the roommate was to take a moral stand and refuse to be 'bought off' by the record label. He could have insisted on pressing charges or sued civilly for theft, copyright infringement and so on — but he didn't.

Perhaps the duo's confidence, then, came from their knowledge of the roommate's desperate desire for fame and a career in the business, such that that as long as they had the first-mover advantage of getting the album into production, the label would clean up the rest.

In closing

It was surprising to me at the time how candid the singer-songwriter was relating this anecdote. I would ordinarily have figured that he might be at risk of retaliation from 'established' or 'powerful' music figures, not to mention accusing a massive label of underhanded dealings.

He did note though, that this stuff was essentially an open secret in the business, so presumably he was confident that as long as he didn't go properly public with it (ie. to the media) nothing was going to come of it, for him or for the perpetrators.

From my current understanding — and purely in speculation mode now — it was probably the least illegal or immoral thing some of these characters had been up to.