Home Taping Is Killing Music
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“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.
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[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
