In recent days, the country has been engaged in an interesting discussion over the piracy issue. From NTA all the way down to your local radio station, it seems the hunger strike embarked by the Nigerian Music Industry Coalition has got everybody and their mother talking. Mission half-complete, or so it would seem. The unfortunate thing about a society like ours, where ADD is a more common pandemic than HIV, is that the singer Yellow King’s near brush with fate will be yesterday’s news as soon as Governor Sanusi unveils a brand new list of bank MDs to be sacked. Sad but true. While my intention is in no way to belittle the efforts and sacrifices that the group has taken, I do want to use the window their demonstration has created to shed light on a particular face of piracy so many of us refuse to see even though it stares us right in the face every single day.

Earlier this year, a court in the American state of Minnesota ordered a woman to pay the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA, the landmark sum of $2 million and what was her offence? Well it turns out that the young lady had illegally downloaded a total of 24 songs from the internet. Yeols boss, I didn’t stutter, I said two and four. At that rate, it would mean she was being fined $80,000 for each song she downloaded. That’s in the United States, who’s checking what goes on over here?

In just this year alone, more than half a dozen Nigerian artists and their management have been terrified to see their songs hit the internet before their producers had taken his thumb off the record button. Illegal file sharing is no longer just an oyibo thing, Nigerians have caught on. Everyday entire albums, mixtapes and EPs are uploaded and downloaded with a frequency akin to Pres. Yar’Adua’s medical trips abroad.

In an industry where no proper indigenous network exists on the internet to legally distribute music and pay artistes their due royalties, those unable to purchase the physical CDs mainly due to the fact that they live abroad might argue that if more and more artistes took the pain to put up their music on online services such as I-Tunes and Amazon, then they would in turn pay up the money required to purchase this music. And quite honestly, it baffles me why several A-list musicians view a presence on such music stores as a luxury and not a necessity. This is even more worrying when artistes continually cry about how much Alaba is doing them ‘strong tin’ but never explore the chance to squeeze out a profit however tiny, from online sales. Even if it isn’t for the money, do it for the good of your global brand but I digress. That issue is left for artistes, their managers and record labels to sort out, let me and you do our own part.

I do not know how many songs you might have obtained illegally within your lifetime. I personally lost count somewhere between one hundred and one thousand; let he who doesn’t have a single kilobyte of illegal music and I’m not talking about MI, be the first to smash the escape key and leave this page. What I am saying however is that if we continue doing this to the industry we claim we love, there might soon be a time when nobody would be interested in spending his hard-earned money to make the music you will only end up downloading and sharing for free.

We are ALL pirates; some of us just stay in Alaba.

(theChiaman is a writer for Hip Hop World Magazine, Nigeria. If you want to get the inside scoop on the Nigerian music industry, pick up your copy of the Hip Hop World Magazine when our brand new edition dedicated to Michael Jackson’s life hits news stands around the country in the coming weeks).