Take a look around Venice High. Many of your peers, possibly even you, are pirates: music pirates that is. Music piracy has been a growing issue among teenagers for the last two years.

Music piracy is the unauthorized copying of music either by downloading it for free off the Internet, recording onto a tape from the radio, or burning/copying it from another CD, or tape. The rising cost of CDs and the timing of the invention and availability of websites needed to download music may have a great part in the reasons for the rising popularity of music piracy.

Over the last two years, music piracy has gotten more popular. However, since the invention of the tape recorder, people have been recording their music illegally from the radio. But, in 2001, with the popularity of Napster and other websites rising, it became much easier to get music for free. Around the same time, the price of CDs and tapes at music stores was increased to almost $20 instead of roughly $14. This was another incentive to download music. Why pay $20 when you could download it for free?

When you download free music, that's one less CD that the music industry is making a profit on. In 2001, the total number of sales on music dropped 10.3 percent according to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

Students agree that the prices of CDs have been raised too high and many resort to downloading music from the Internet. "I do it [download music] all the time. It's so much cheaper than buying the CD and I get to choose the songs I want without buying the whole album,” says Juliet Stein, grade 12.

The loss of music sales has caused the music industry to take action on the matter. All forms of pirating music have been made illegal, and people who download excessive amounts of music are being fined. Stein thinks those tactics aren’t going to help, “trying to make people stop downloading music and burning CDs is like trying to get the world to stop smoking; it just isn't going to happen.