iPedia Free Information Center

Information about Home Taping Is Killing Music

Enlarge picture
The original logo.
Enlarge picture
The Pirate Bay logo featuring the tape and bones.


“Home Taping Is Killing Music” was the slogan of a 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a British music industry trade group. With the rise in cassette recorder popularity, the BPI feared that home taping would cause a decline in record sales. The logo, consisting of a skull and crossbones formed from the silhouette of a cassette, also included the words And It’s Illegal.

Parodies

The slogan was often parodied, one example being the addendum and it’s about time too!, used by Dutch anarcho-punk band The Ex. Another example was the early 1980s counter-slogan Home Taping Is Skill in Music, referring to early mix-tapes, in some ways a precursor to sampling and remixes. In 1981 the Dead Kennedys printed “Home taping is killing big business profits. We left this side blank so you can help” on one side of In God We Trust, Inc. EP, though ironically the tape stock they used didn’t actually work with most consumer recorders. The cassette & crossbones image was displayed briefly as a backdrop in the "Time Out For Fun" video by the band Devo from their 1982 album, "Oh No! It's Devo". Venom’s classic 1982 album Black Metal had some play with the logo; it read Home Taping Is Killing Music; So Are Venom. The phrase Home-Taping Is Making Music appears on the back cover of Peter Principle’s self-produced 1988 album Tone Poems. The San Diego punk band Rocket from the Crypt sold T-shirts with the tape and bones and the words “Home Taping Is Killing the Music Industry: Killing Ain’t Wrong.” More recently, the pro-p2p file sharing group Downhill Battle has used the slogan “Home Taping Is Killing the Music Industry, and It’s Fun” on T-shirts, and the BitTorrent website ThePirateBay.org uses the logo of a pirate ship whose sails bear the “tape and bones.” Additionally the Pirate Party in the UK have a version of the tape and bones with the logo "copyright is killing music - and it's legal".

Similar rhetoric has continued; in 1982 Jack Valenti famously compared the VCR and its anticipated effect on the movie industry to the Boston Strangler, and in 2005 Mitch Bainwol of the RIAA claimed that CD burning is hurting music sales.

Other references

  • “Home Taping’s Killing Music” is also the title of a short song by Misty’s Big Adventure, a band from Birmingham, which takes the implications of this slogan to their illogical conclusion.
  • The track "Steal This Song" from Mitch Benn's second album Radioface features the line "Home taping isn't killing music; music's dying of natural causes."
  • In 2005, Zane Lowe, a DJ on Radio 1, toured around the United Kingdom with the Home Taping Tour. The promotional materials for this tour bore the skull-and-bones logo.
  • X-Press 2's music video Witchi Tai To includes anthropomorphic Compact Cassettes. Also, a man from the music video wears a red "Home Taping Is Killing Music" shirt.

See also

External links

worldwide view of the subject.
Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page.


This article may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please help Wikipedia by adding references.

..... Click the link for more information.
Copyright infringement (or copyright violation) is the unauthorized use of material which is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the original copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make
..... Click the link for more information.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is the British record industry's trade association. Its membership comprises hundreds of music companies including all four 'major' record companies (Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony BMG, and Universal Music Group), associate members
..... Click the link for more information.
cassette deck is a type of tape recorder for playing or recording audio compact cassettes. A deck was formerly distinguished from a recorder as being part of a stereo component system, while a recorder had a self-contained power amplifier and speakers.
..... Click the link for more information.
skull and crossbones is a symbol consisting of a human skull and two bones crossed together under the skull. Today, it is generally used as a warning of danger (usually in regard to poisonous substances).
..... Click the link for more information.
Compact Cassette

Typical 60-minute Compact Cassette
Media type: magnetic tape
Encoding: analog signal
Capacity: 23 minutes per side (C46)
30 minutes per side (C60)
45 minutes per side (C90)
50 minutes per side (C100)
60 minutes per side (C120)
..... Click the link for more information.
In contemporary usage, a parody (or lampoon) is a work that imitates another work in order to ridicule, ironically comment on, or poke some affectionate fun at the work itself, the subject of the work, the author or fictional voice of the parody, or another subject.
..... Click the link for more information.
Motto
"Je maintiendrai"   (French)
"Ik zal handhaven"   (Dutch)
"I shall stand fast"1
Anthem
..... Click the link for more information.
Anarcho-punk is a faction of the punk subculture that consists of bands, groups and individuals promoting anarchist politics.

Although not all punks support anarchism, the ideology has played a significant role in the punk subculture, and punk has had a significant
..... Click the link for more information.
For other uses, see The Ex.


The Ex is an anarchist band from the Netherlands. They formed in 1979 at the height of the original punk explosion and have released more than twenty full length albums since.
..... Click the link for more information.
worldwide view of the subject.
Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page.


This article may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please help Wikipedia by adding references.

..... Click the link for more information.
sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. This is typically done with a sampler, which can be a piece of hardware or a computer program on a digital computer.
..... Click the link for more information.
ReMix may refer to:
  • A musical arrangement
  • OverClocked ReMix, a website which hosts video game musical arrangements
  • reMix, a novel by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

See also

  • Remix
A remix
..... Click the link for more information.
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1978 1979 1980 - 1981 - 1982 1983 1984

Year 1981 (MCMLXXXI
..... Click the link for more information.
Devo (pronounced DEE-vo or dee-VO, often spelled "DEVO" or "DEV-O") is an American New Wave group, formed in Akron, Ohio in 1972. They are best known for their 1980 hit "Whip It", which made it to #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
..... Click the link for more information.
Venom are a heavy metal band, formed in late 1979 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

Coming to prominence towards the end of the 'New Wave of British Heavy Metal', Venom have found little mainstream success or critical acclaim, but are widely regarded as highly influential,
..... Click the link for more information.
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1979 1980 1981 - 1982 - 1983 1984 1985

Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII
..... Click the link for more information.
Black Metal
(1982) At War with Satan
(1983)

Black Metal is the second album by Venom, and the origin of the term "black metal". It was released in 1982 and is considered one of the most important albums to the extreme metal movement, most
..... Click the link for more information.
For the BBC sitcom, see .
The Peter Principle is a colloquial principle of hierarchiology, stated as "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Formulated by Dr. Laurence J.
..... Click the link for more information.
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1985 1986 1987 - 1988 - 1989 1990 1991

Year 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII
..... Click the link for more information.
City of San Diego
San Diego Skyline

Flag
Seal
Nickname: America's Finest City
Motto: Semper Vigilans (Latin: Ever Vigilant)
Location of San Diego
within San Diego County
..... Click the link for more information.
Rocket From the Crypt was an American rock band led by John Reis, formed in 1990 in San Diego, California and disbanded in 2005. Of Reis' many musical endeavors, Rocket From the Crypt were the most successful and most internationally recognized.
..... Click the link for more information.
peer-to-peer (or "P2P") computer network exploits diverse connectivity between participants in a network and the cumulative bandwidth of network participants rather than conventional centralized resources where a relatively low number of servers provide the core value to a
..... Click the link for more information.
See Shared resource for the conventional meaning of file sharing
File sharing is the practice of making files available for other users to download over the Internet and smaller networks.
..... Click the link for more information.
Downhill Battle is a non-profit organization based in Worcester, Massachusetts. It launched in August 2003 and argues that the four major recording labels have an oligopoly that is bad for both musicians and music culture. They believe that there is an opportunity to change that.
..... Click the link for more information.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources.
..... Click the link for more information.
The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker" and also serves as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. ThePirateBay.
..... Click the link for more information.
The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) is originally a political party in Sweden, which has given rise to groups with similar goals internationally.
..... Click the link for more information.
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1979 1980 1981 - 1982 - 1983 1984 1985

Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII
..... Click the link for more information.
Jack Joseph Valenti (September 5 1921 – April 26 2007)[1][2] was a long-time president of the Motion Picture Association of America. During his 38-year tenure in the MPAA, he created the MPAA film rating system, and he was generally regarded as one of
..... Click the link for more information.


This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the wikipedia encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.
Herod_Archelaus


page counter