YouTube download sites are “biggest piracy threat” to music industry

For videos I can see the value though, anything below 720 is quite obvious.

I would also argue the music industry cares more about control than about raw sales. This is because, they aim for: A. a fixed tax of "what you're willing to pay for entertainment" from everyone in a given country, B. an ability to manage trends and use that trend management to bring residuals (movies, toys, fashion-shoot, whatever for their established artists). C. a strong bargaining position versus their artists - the more they can say "we made you, we can break you and replace you", the more leverage they have in negotiations.

Of course there is, but the regime have to be much more repressive than 1950s Soviet Union to achieve that.

> Mostly made through the 1950s and 1960s, ribs were a black market method of smuggling in and distributing prohibited music by foreign and emigre musicians banned from broadcast in the Soviet Union. Real medical X-rays, purchased or picked up from the trash from hospitals and clinics were used to create the recordings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribs_%28recordings%29

There weren't piracy in North Korea until 1990s AFAIK.

This exists commercially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

I don't know if it's truly "inaudible", maybe some experts can detect it? But probably 99% of people can't.

Look only as far as YouTube to see what content creators do when the money well dries up - a lot have turned to selling products/advertising themselves with direct deals (dollar shave club, Nord VPN, etc). Another method is through "merch", something Disney for example has been doing for years.

Besides, many Countries simply don't respect media copyright full-stop, it wouldn't harm creators to learn to hustle for other (potentially wider) markets.

To be clear, I think you are right, people want the product. Just I think the music industry product is actually facilitating groupthink about popularity. Even then they have a 99 in 100 failure rate.

It used to be about distribution. Seems pretty clear (from anecdata) that artists these days selling independently or even on platforms like bandcamp (which is awesome) make more on a couple hundred sales than artists with record companies make on a couple thousand.

And i think you are right that innovation won't help them. Or at least, this is actually the way they innovate.. Through bullying and legislation. And to that end, I hope they go to hell.

Companies exist to serve their customers. The companies that forget this tend to decline.

The model faces some threat due to the shift of musicians moving to do their own marketing themselves without a label, and releasing the music themselves onto services like Bandcamp, or even directly to services such as Amazon, iTunes, etc. The internet has provided a powerful medium to fight against the entrenched interests of the big labels that don't feel like they need to do more for their artists.

There are alternative business models – you mention live shows and concerts, but there's also things like the street performer protocol. But as long as the law artificially props up the old-fashioned way of doing things, there's no impetus to try other things. They aren't intrinsically entitled to this specific business model and it makes less and less sense to keep up this weird fiction for this reason.

There are similar laws in Germany, Belgium, Spain, and maybe other countries.