Put your “musical family†first! Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Probably many people that you, as a musician, associate with are also musicians. We musicians get lulled into the idea that we make up a huge part of the population. However, it has been said that if all the people professionally involved in music were gathered together – teachers, performers of classical, pop, rock, country, jazz, sacred and other music and their peripheral entourages, composers and arrangers, music publishers, musical instrument and music accessory manufacturers, sheet music and instrument retailers, recording personnel and anyone else who makes a living in the music industry – their numbers would total roughly the same as the employees of Kellogg’s Cereal Company.
We are a finite group – a relatively small family of people of “like mind” all trying to make a living doing what we love to do – make music. Keep that in mind when you casually consider copying a piece of copyrighted music; you are keeping many of your musical brothers and sisters from making a living. Publishers can only continue supporting composers in their endeavors to create innovative music if they are able to rely on sales of previously published pieces. When you photocopy, you are preventing new composers and their music from emerging. We are all in this together, so let’s help each other out in any way we can. Copying sheet music is not only illegal, it’s immoral.