Globally, Almost Four Out of Ten Music Consumers Are Pirates
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
I'm of an era that I remember CD albums would cost 15-20GBP sometimes, and I'm still very album-oriented in my listening. My 'thing' these days is buying digital copies of releases I like, and buying a vinyl copy of releases I really like, so I have a memento. The shipping costs can be steep, especially trans-Atlantic, but the tangible collection of records in a flight case is the closest thing to a safe of valuables that I own.
Buy the vinyl, and typically there's an included copy of the digital version (either a code in the sleeve or a gratis copy in Bandcamp's case), so I can then download the FLAC and make whatever format I want from there. Total price typically ends up being more expensive than one of those 15-20GBP CDs from a bygone era, but I've got a digital copy I can play over and over, and a physical copy as a keepsake.
I've found a lot of new music from Bandcamp. Their articles are high quality, and have directed me toward all kinds of music I wouldn't usually listen to.
(Disclaimer: active customer of Bandcamp, not connected in any financial or professional sense, no other affiliation…though I do think about applying to work with them from time to time.)
Edit: I use the same username here as I do on Bandcamp if anyone wants to snoop on my collection and/or wantlist, or be internet friends etc.
It’s evident that they are a small team. They need some work. For example I accidentally bought all work from an artist AND and individual album in the same checkout and I couldn’t undo it. So I double purchased an album. Support never responded.
So Bandcamp works great for me. It offers all the options I want (FLAC) and I like that a band can set the price to 0$ so you can download it from Bandcamp for free but you can give them money if you want to. Awesome experience all around. And with the music I like most of the bands are on Bandcamp.
Quality wise for listening you aren't going to tell the difference between a -v0 MP3 and FLAC even if you think otherwise. For anyone that wants to claim otherwise, unless you've had someone setup an A/B test with a significant amount of cases you're falling victim to placebo.
I say this as a professional audio engineer, who long ago would always seek out FLAC. Now, unless I need to edit or re-encode a file the MP3 is just as good, far from shitty.
Back when I ripped CDs, I encoded my MP3s with variable bitrate with the quality set to high. They average around 192 kbps. I was never able to tell the difference between the CD and the MP3 at that rate.
Works fantastic. Sounds a lil' better than zip-cord, and of course at these levels it's a game of countless 'lil better' choices wherever possible.
I guess you could pay $2000 to have the conductors made out of silver and yak hair, but the 'heavier conductors and cable geometry' parts don't require any of that.
I did that MP3/FLAC A/B/X test back in my audio engineer days after catching a ton of condescending comments due to my listening of 'terrible sounding' MP3s.
Either my ears are garbage, or the difference is so subtle that even with solid headphones in a dead quiet room, the absolute best you could hope to be able to detect is that one is "different." getting all the way to "shitty" sounds near impossible to me.
Also, to my surprise, if you burned someone a cd from an MP3 source, but told the person it was Flac, it'd still "sound really smooth". Hm.
Agreed. See also: relative cable quality (for electric instrumentalists).
Edit: a LOT if not most of new music at this point contains samples ripped from Youtube. Something to consider also.
It's nice to have a lossless format because you can always get lossy from it, but you can't do the opposite.
Arguments about sound quality are in my experience largely doomed to failure; they usually end up devolving into meta-arguments about testing methodologies. (And invariably mocking audiophiles about $2000 USB cables or whatever, an argument I've grown really, really weary of seeing despite agreeing such things are profoundly silly.)
As far as people saying 320k MP3s vs Uncompressed WAV or FLACs sound no different, then they simply are not using good enough audio equipment. Throw into the mix the Hi-bitrate audio files that are becoming quite common (and you really can tell the difference between standard CD audio and hi-bitrate) and MP3s start to look completely unsuitable for long term music storage.
Also... don't get me started on the rubbish quality of streaming and DAB radio.
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[1] I started with WAV 10+ years ago, and kinda stuck with it - storage is cheap; I feel no need to change formats just yet.
The degradation is much like what you'd get running the mix through a generic digital EQ imposing some subtle but high-order filters, or going through the mix buss of an unexceptional DAW that's doing a lot of bit-shuffling to get to the output, perhaps with some unnecessary gain changes.
These are shitty if you have seriously good monitoring and care about ambience and soundstage depth and subtle emotional cues or shades of texture. Sooo… not exactly 'OMG, super obvious on earbuds through iTunes with the aural exciters on'. That stuff will wreck the sound MUCH worse than -v0 mp3, no argument there.
If you're working on gear where you'd be able to tell the difference, and you have experience with listening for the specific objectionable qualities of lossy audio, then you can hear the lossy audio even at its best.
Otherwise, the cure for bad sounding mp3s is to do 'em 320K and call it a day. Throwing more bits at it does definitely help. It's not hard to get mp3 over the threshold where other parts of the playback system harm the sound worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexcitability
Not many people got sensory overexcitability so a/b testing with random selection might not show those peoples opinions.
Its like saying most of humanity can't read JavaScript code so JavaScript is a completely shit programming language that are only used by stupid uninformed mindless coders who don't understand real programming, and that they are too lacking in intellectual ability to realize that and move over to a real programming language.
And also some music just does not work in low quality, it just turns into noise.
While it may be the case that the direct parent of my post may have this, they still pointed out the differences were minor compared to pretty much every other technical factor at play in the digital to ear pipeline.
I'm sure there's a technical name for it, but for a significant number of people, once you get used to the higher quality it's harder and harder to go back down a level.
Not sure if they were 320k though.
I'd agree that for most music I can't tell the difference. But there are some tracks where the difference is noticeable, even if it's minor. I've tested myself thoroughly by running automated ABX tests.
I don't have got anything against MP3s in general, but back when I was buying MP3s (Amazon or Downloads when you are buying a record) sometimes I got 256kbps MP3s or even worse. I think one time I even got a 192kbps MP3. And that's my problem.
When I am buying music digitally I would like to have a very very good (or even perfect) digital copy of the music - not something that saves download bandwith and space on the hard drive(for me these days are over).
I am fine with 320kpbs MP3s - but if I pay for it I prefer FLAC.
I would add that for long-term archiving purposes, vinyl has many advantages over digital formats. I'll admit this is probably not a concern for most people, but once I own something on vinyl it feels much more like I own a permanent copy of the music.
As for cd's, I am no expert on this by any means, but I wonder how prevalent disc rot will become as some discs age to 30, 40, 50+ years old in the near future:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
As far as I know vinyl doesn't have a comparable risk of degradation while sitting at rest in climate controlled storage. But I agree that the downsides are major concerns.
The advantage of vinyl is in your last sentence: "once I own something on vinyl it feels much more like I own a permanent copy of the music".
That's totally fine for me if you feel this way, but I don't. I feel better with multiple digital copies of the music on multiple places.
Most of my listening comes from streaming and buying records but bandcamp has a special place in my heart. Especially since they still haven't gotten greedy and started inserting ads everywhere. (maybe they're mining our data? I dunno).
- supports the artists (and lots of them, not just the biggest ones)
- gives me instant, irrefutable ownership of the music I've bought
- gives great download format choice
If an artist is on bandcamp, it is a no-brainer for me to throw them their minimum + 1/2 dollars and buy an album. I can't say everyone thinks this way, but the feeling that I'm supporting the artists is felt more directly than on any other platform, and it feels good. To me, it's worth the price increase from free (to a point).
If I could buy all my music on bandcamp I would. The only thing better than bandcamp would be a distributed/federated network of direct-from-band merch and album stores with (somehow) good discovery features written in a way that made it easy for bands to set up payment distribution (ex. stripe integration, shipping fulfillment integration, etc) -- but bandcamp is close enough.
If you can't get something legally - because you actually can't, or because you can't afford it, it's a 'victimless crime' and you desperately want it - you'll pirate it. But I think most people are happy to pay for the convenience of everything. £10 a month for Spotify is a no brainer for me. The problem happens when (label?) greed sinks in again and the streaming services fragment with 'exclusives' on each. At that point, people end up picking one to spend their cash on, and they'll pirate or stream a shitty version on YouTube the songs they can't get on their streaming service.
You want to get more people to pay? Licence everything to everything - then the only people that will pirate are the ones that would never pay anyway. And I bet they're a smaller subset than four in ten.
Fragmentation is a huge problem, and I don’t understand it. Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform. Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair and let the platforms fight to provide the best experience. As a music, TV or movie studio you’re the only one that sure to make money.
This would be amazing. Imagine picking your streaming service based on who has the best app / recommendations / social baked in (or whatever you were looking for). But from a friend that works in TV sales - the platforms fight and pay for the exclusives. If it's going to everyone - pass. That money helps film the new stuff. I guess music has an advantage in the respect that it doesn't really work like that - and it's much cheaper to record an album. That's why it's so frustrating when music services fragment.
It's pretty rare that I can find something on Spotify that isn't on Google yet (or vice versa), and even then they usually catch up to each other eventually.
because voluntarily giving up control over your content to a monopole means you loose leverage. If 90% of all video content is on netflix, they can set the terms, not you. "we're paying half of that or we dont host it".
> Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair
They most likely do. But if noone else is willing to pay enough, its only going to be on their own platform.
if your content has a price in the open, streaming platforms can then compete on price/quality to end user. instead, today, they compete 100% on exclusives.
> streaming platforms can then compete
It seems fragmentation is part of your premise rather than something you're disagreeing about.
The post your replied to explained why there's fragmentation: one winner takes it all if you let it.
Distribution of content is a "near-zero" cost relative to content production. However, the value of content distribution value is much higher than content. Furthermore, the value of the distribution of the content rises exponentially based on the collective set of content.
It's basically designed as a winner-take-all environment, so you have a bunch of digital fiefdoms. Or as put by Jim Barksdale on How to Make Money: "you either bundle or unbundle".
I pay for Hulu, HBO Now, and Amazon Prime. I suspect a year or two from now the same (or more) money will get me less content, as even more is segregated into separate streaming platforms. I think I'll end up just trading accounts with people, so they can use mine, and I can use their Disney, Showtime and Youtube TV or something. I'll get more content for the same price. But once I've done that, why not share three ways, and each person can pay for two services instead of three, and I'll get more content than now at less cost?
We've finally gotten to a place where people are happy to pay to stream because content is actually available and it's much more convenient, and the rights holders are so greedy they are going to force people back into the mindset that stealing is okay (but this time it's stealing services, not digital content).
The producers are merging with content providers precisely because it allows for this maximization of revenue. It's no accident. Apple ruined it by taking 30% of most digital activity on the planet - that's where the money is at scale and you won't see a reversal until those margins start to approach zero.
If a content producer wants the most amount of profit for a known good, say a famous band, (meaning they don't need to give it away to get discovered) then you'll make sure to fragment your customers and make the people that want it most "pay" the most. It makes all kinds of sense as a producer, and it happens in every industry.
Piracy is consumers saying "this is BS" and stealing the content so they don't have to pay more - because they feel entitled to do so. Sure, "let everything be free" is a wonderful goal culturally and for consumers but the model won't win out for things in extremely high demand.
They are the two sides of the same coin, which is that people don't want to pay what the content providers want to charge. Fragmentation wouldn't be a problem if each service was 99 cents a month, and bundling wouldn't be a problem if one big service that had everything charged $10 a month. Netflix showed that the latter is true - people generally don't complain about having to pay for all the content they don't care about on Netflix because they feel that what they do watch is worth at least $10/month.
As to music industry revenues--they're basically flat over the last 20 years: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=9McmTl.... Which is crazy, because the number of new consumers that can afford their product is through the roof.
People treat piracy as a victimless crime because the marginal cost of each item is zero. Imagine extending similar logic to a handbag. If you steal an LV purse you can’t afford, how do you measure damages? The $1,000 marginal cost to physically replicate the purse, or the $10,000 retail price? That basic logic doesn’t change as the marginal cost goes to zero.
The moral rationalizations don't really hold water. It's not like the music industry is out there lobbying to prevent competing content. Their whole business model is creating content that's so desirable that they are non-fungible--people won't settle for a slightly different clone. Advances in digital technology have made it so the cost to create content is lower than ever. But people don't want just any superhero movie, want to see Wonder Woman or the Avengers: Infinity War.
And their control is expanding. Older works that should (by historical precedent) be part of the commons remain copyrighted because of endless extensions. Practices that were once legal and common become illegal (like copying tapes vs copying CDs) or technically difficult (like recording music off the radio vs recording music off the Internet).
Fighting back and "lowering the price everyone is willing to pay" doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.
I respect your right to your opinion that poor people should be prevented from hearing or seeing something entertaining because a corporation wants more money (it's rarely the creator who makes these decisions), but that's not the only legitimate opinion.
Copyright isn't a law handed down by God; it's a fairly new legal creation on the scale of human history and its constant expansion is a major factor behind increasing inequality in the world.
In fact, most of the world still doesn't believe it, which is why the US has to fight so hard to expand copyright and patent protection in other nations.
Yes, copyright is an artificial barrier, but a barrier to what? It's not a barrier to fair competition. It's a barrier to circumventing a creators right to bargain about the price of her creation.
Copyright itself isn't "handed down by God," but the idea that people should own the fruits of their own labor is an old one. That's all copyright is.
The origin of copyright was providing monopoly rights to the Stationers Guild in Britain to control printing of works under the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. So a right vested in the printers who wanted to be able to sell for much higher prices than the duplication itself justified, not the authors.
Of course this would also allow them to pay more to authors, because they would be able to amortise it over more copies, but the guild had a monopoly on printing, so it was not in any of their interests to substantially increase the proportion paid to authors - the main benefit of this monopoly was to themselves.
When parliament refused to renew it after protests because of the censorship it authorised, the Stationers Guild kept trying to push for it to be reintroduced, and first then started pushing the "authors rights" angle, leading to the Statue of Anne (Copyright Act 1710), which was the first "modern" copyright act in that it vested rights in authors.
But the idea of restricting the ability to copy to favour the creators of a work was something the printers first started pushing for their own interest because their abuse of the copyrights previously granted to them directly made it unpalatable to re-authorise those rights.
If copyright law wasn't serving the interests of Disney, Sony, and other big corporations, they'd be pressuring politicians to change it, rather than expand it to other countries.
What determines legitimate? There is, of course, the law. But the law has numerous limits and abilities to be exploited. To some extent, the law of the past was violated by the RIAA and others, and so nothing they do could be considered legitimate. And on a very different line of reasoning, the law can be considered only a tax and thus it is legitimate to pay the tax once enforced.
>The music industry isn't "brib[ing] politicians" to "create artificial barriers" to people creating competing content.
They don't lobby for laws that do things such as lead to YouTube creating copyright systems they can then exploit to take out competitors? Using government to capture the EM spectrum so that indies cannot compete on it? No, they aren't being simplistic tropes that bribe the government to outlaw all competition directly, but I would suggest to not use that as one's only measurement.
This is a self-serving rationalization that is not universally true. There are plenty of labels that are artist-owned, or are very friendly to artists. These tend to be small or mid-sized labels, and have been the most hurt by piracy. Ani Difranco has spoken about the impact of piracy on her Righteous Babe Records. Fat Mike of Fat Wreck Chords has spoken about the impact of piracy on independent and growing bands.
Meanwhile the biggest labels (the ones you're complaining about) have done just fine under piracy because they've never hesitated to sign acts desperate for the big time to crappy 360 deals that give the label a cut of every single revenue stream.
Looking at "the music industry" as a whole obscures the truth, which is that the shape of the music industry has changed--the middle has been hollowed out.
What we have now is a system in which it's easier than ever to get discovered, but if you want to actually make money, you're more dependent than ever on a huge company to permit that to happen--whether it's a big label, commercial sync deals, Ticketmaster, YouTube, etc.
It's an argument that copyright law serves the interests of a few at the expense of the many.
And I think you've missed the point about smaller bands and labels. They struggle whether they sign with a big label or go independent because only superstars and big corporations make big money from music. Many fans know this and are generous to support their favorite smaller bands.
> (Just like jumping the turnstile in the subway is not a victimless crime even if there are free seats, or sneaking into a sports stadium.)
It's not at all like jumping a turnstile or sneaking into a stadium.
There are real costs associated with servicing an in-person customer on a train or stadium. From additional security, to garbage, to air conditioning. All those might seem small but it is an additional expense on the operator of those services.
Downloading music without paying doesn't cost the music industry a dime.
I'm not saying using IP without paying is acceptable but your comparison doesn't take a proper look at the issue.
Further...
> As to music industry revenues--they're basically flat over the last 20 years: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=9McmTl.... Which is crazy, because the number of new consumers that can afford their product is through the roof.
The number of consumers is higher but so is the competition for entertainment. Netflix, YouTube, etc. are more likely taking revenue than someone downloading a song without paying.
The marginal cost of a stow-away on a subway train or in a sports stadium is very nearly zero. Even if it isn't, there is no magical moral transition that happens as the marginal cost goes from $10 to $1 to $0.01 to $0. The reason sneaking into a sports stadium is wrong is not because it deprives the stadium owner of the $0.01 marginal cost of an additional person being present. It's because it deprives them of the opportunity to sell a ticket for $100.
The argument is that pirates wouldn't have bought the song, so it's not depriving the artist of any revenue. The pirate either doesn't have the song or they pirate it. Buying it is not one of their options.
The stadium owner would never see the $100 because the person couldn't afford to purchase the ticket. So, it's not lost revenue to them. However, if someone sneaks in, now you're costing the owner money.
That's why I'm saying the in-person analogy doesn't fit.
But there sort of is. Everywhere else when a company is caught selling something for big multiples of the marginal costs, people are outraged. Think of e.g. costs of SMS in the past (which were essentially free for the providers), or how people react to ticket scalping. Even drugs, where the initial costs are high, don't get a free pass here. In most areas of the market, you have competition that ensures margins are reasonable, and outside those areas, people selling way over what they need to recoup the costs are generally considered assholes.
> The reason sneaking into a sports stadium is wrong is not because it deprives the stadium owner of the $0.01 marginal cost of an additional person being present. It's because it deprives them of the opportunity to sell a ticket for $100.
On the other hand, if a stadium was already making money hand over fist on the game, recouping their costs with a wide margin, being too bitter about a couple of people sneaking in would be considered soulless, whereas turning a blind eye would be considered noble. This is a more complex and context-dependent topic; things do not boil down to "opportunity to sell". Hell, in this particular case I'd expect most people's intuitions would be related to general property rights (not paying $100 is trespassing).
No they're not; people in the U.S. buy a heck of a lot of bottled water, despite the fact that potable water is available basically anywhere for free.
And try this: shoplift a bottle of water from a 7-11 and when the cops come, tell them that water is free anyway, and the 7-11 has a big multiple markup, so it's not really a crime. See how that goes.
That may be the case today, but companies selling bottled water have huge marketing budgets and exploit people's lack of trust in public institutions.
> And try this: shoplift a bottle of water from a 7-11 and when the cops come, tell them that water is free anyway, and the 7-11 has a big multiple markup, so it's not really a crime. See how that goes.
I wouldn't shoplift a bottle just as I wouldn't shoplift a music CD. I wouldn't even go to the shop in the first place, as I can get both drinking water and the songs I want from near-free sources, and with better quality.
So.. just downvoting and not even a single comment how this doesn't apply? To me, that's simply people that want to continue the party without having to explain themselves.
Let me offer the opposing perspective.
Why should a business use the State to enforce a broken scarce physical property model at odds with how information honestly disseminates (impedance mismatch or category error) just so they can prop up their own business models? If their business models can’t be profitable without enforcing draconian and perhaps misapplied rules, then their business model should not be viable and we should rely on eg open source collaboration or hobbyists. Perhaps businesses SHOULDN’T have a “right” to create really complex movies music and software if it means causing far more others harm downstream.
Humans make up systems to enforce this or that “right”, which is nothing but a guarantee from some organization (eg a state) that they will fight to coerce someone to honor some agreement, even if you didn’t make one explicitly.
I never made an agreement to NOT listen to someone’s song. With a turnstile, I can be physically prevented from entering the premises until I agree to an agreement. The turnstile can be made “unjumpable” - and many are. If I didn’t explicitly agree to anything then maybe I can jump the turnstile, in a libertarian world where we have to explicitly agree to something.
Anyway, now let’s assume we are not in an ancap utopia. So people form organizations and they figure out what system of coersion works and what doesn’t.
The system of private property requires force to enforce, just as much as other “government” things. So it may be justified for personal protection and chattel property, but as you move further away from that, it may be less justified and have less payoff. Should a person be able to own an idea, or 50000 acres of land if others can put it to good use?
And how did they come to own it? “Homesteading” the land or idea? John Locke who coined the idea also said a man shouldn’t own more land than he can cultivate himself or arrange an organization to do efficiently, or society is wasting land. And also you may have massive rent seeking and sharecropping. Like how we had now with A&R departments and actual artists before Spotify. Or — sorry fellow entrepreneurs — how Facebook Google and others exploit their infrastructure monopoly and lock-in to have access to all your data and exercise control because there are no open-source alternatives.
Is this really the best system? Is it the most moral? You appeal to morality of the individual in the system but you must first consider the benefits and legitimacy of the system itself.
There is zero harm to others downstream, because the only thing those people are being deprived of is a product that wouldn't exist at all without the "evil" content creators. You're not being deprived of anything when you can't download Avengers: Infinity Wars for free. You're just prevented from having your cake and eating it too. (I.e. consuming a product that was created in express reliance on the copyright system, without paying for it.) Which is the reason we allow companies to enforce this artificial scarcity--it allows creation of a product that people want more than the alternatives.
It's precisely because this scarcity is artificial that it's moral. If people wanted to consume content from "open source collaboration or hobbyists" then they would do it. Nothing is stopping them. But people don't want the hobbyist project, they want the $200 million Hollywood blockbuster. And if that's the case, people have no right to demand access to that content on terms different from what the creator is willing to agree to.
That seems quite silly. Obviously you're being deprived of watching Avengers: Infinity War.
“But if we didn’t have government, who would build the roads???”
“But if we didn’t have copyright, who would write all the software and encyclopedias?!? Oh wait...”
If you make a moral argument about a pirate in the system, prepare to get an opposing moral argument about the system itself.
How many people could have been cured of Malaria if we allowed open source drug research to flourish? In every OTHER science department eg physics people publish their ideas freely.
But how is that possible without patents???
They are deprived of interacting with the front lines of modern culture.
I think people have no right to view a film that has hidden in a box since creation. Once a film enters popular culture, I think the argument that the creator should continue to hold complete dictatorial control over it is questionable.
>There is zero harm to others downstream
Draconian IP laws and content filters and DCMA abuse and cost of complying is harm. DRM software itself already has been proved to be a security problem even when handled by the biggest of tech corps.
These costs are externalized for copyright holders. These costs are real because those things already do happen to people. Unlike these existing costs, opportunities lost are only hypothetical. Saying that we should abolish IP is ridiculous but so is claiming that current laws and industry is reasonable in their reach for media control.
We should also consider the fact that someone not being familiar with a piece of art and not creating art being unable to use other work is harm. Though these costs are on par with hypothetically lost profits and hypothetically lost creators in their ephemerality.
>a product that was created in express reliance on the copyright system
This system severely overreaching and limiting freedom of people without showing a connection between implemented laws and technologies and the ability to produce. It may rely on some parts of system but not the other. It's up to copyright lobby to demonstrate if it does at all.
>It's precisely because this scarcity is artificial that it's moral.
So is price collusion and human torture. If drm and music are to grow on trees it wouldn't change a thing about the moral aspect of the thing. We're free to decide on the morality of copyright enforcement without looking at its nature.
Does it though? Someone jumping the turnstile in the subway doesn't make me think "man, my ticket is too expensive really".
Instead, it makes me think "that person can't afford a ticket, but the additional operating cost of the subway for a rare unpaying passenger is basically nothing, and a free trip probably means a lot to someone poor, so letting them get away with that has basically added value to the world for free".
I believe most people are honest and want to play by the book. Large-scale cheating indicates an underlying problem, like poverty or general shittiness of the only available options.
"It lowers the price everyone is willing to pay for the item". Not really. This is happening because the supply of music continues to grow each year. I can't find the article, but a (I believe) French economist predicted this would happen decades ago (1980s?)
To some extent it does, simply because of "why should I pay ${exorbitant amount of money} if I can torrent it for free?" consideration. Which is, IMO, a fair consideration, as we're talking about goods that are infinitely reproducible for $0.00 marginal cost. The availability of piracy does cause problems for "legitimate" distributors, but this doesn't automatically imply torrents are bad and labels have the moral high ground.
The core of the problem stems from the goods being infinitely reproducible for $0.00 marginal cost. Such goods inherently don't work with the scarcity-based business models invented for physical items. Media companies are doing the world great harm by trying to brute-force this impedance mismatch by legislation and technology.
https://www.billboard.com/files/media/01-GMR-graph-billboard...
You may not be aware, but on digital, they charge less for an album than LP and compact disc. So given the decline in sales of physical media, and the rise in streaming, (which they get paid next-to-nothing for, I might add,) along with the overall increase of non-streamed digital sales, they've absolutely gotten millions of new consumers. It's just cheaper now, because physical media has huge markups.
> People treat piracy as a victimless crime because the marginal cost of each item is zero. Imagine extending similar logic to a handbag. If you steal an LV purse you can’t afford, how do you measure damages? The $1,000 marginal cost to physically replicate the purse, or the $10,000 retail price? That basic logic doesn’t change as the marginal cost goes to zero.
It absolutely does; they aren't taking it from the publisher of the music, or an outlet for music, they're having it shared with them from the second-hand market. This allows no loss on the part of the publisher (and more importantly artist), no inefficiency in having to restock an item, and doesn't involve the publisher in any way.
It's not stealing, it's copying. If you steal something on physical media, you'll be making them lose something, and they'll have to replace it. If you copy something on digital media, they don't have to spend man-hours replacing something.
> The moral rationalizations don't really hold water. It's not like the music industry is out there lobbying to prevent competing content. Their whole business model is creating content that's so desirable that they are non-fungible--people won't settle for a slightly different clone. Advances in digital technology have made it so the cost to create content is lower than ever. But people don't want just any superhero movie, want to see Wonder Woman or the Avengers: Infinity War.
There aren't live shows in the case of movies, and at those live shows the actors wouldn't be receiving the largest amount of currency for acting in them.
In the case of music?
The venue is far more generous with the split than the label is.
With music piracy, it has a very strong chance of increasing an artist's revenue from live sales, which is better for them than purchases of albums, anyway.
Also, it's worth noting that the EU ran a study on the effects of digital piracy just a few years ago; and their results were...
https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...
...that in the case of games, piracy improved sales, in the case of movies, piracy decreased sales, and in the case of everything else, piracy had no effect on sales at all.
*
And I'm saying this as a person who buys LP and digital all the time.
> It absolutely does...
I mostly agree with your comment, but you gave up to easily on this part. The basic logic is exactly the same—but the correct assessment of the damage in this scenario is the $1,000 marginal cost to replace the stolen purse, not the artificially inflated $10,000 retail price.
Of course, there is another, more important, difference in play besides marginal cost: the copyright holder is already "whole". Their ability to use their property has not been impacted in the slightest by the existence of additional copies. The concept of "damages" in such a scenario is completely artificial.
If humanity could invent a magical machine that makes a direct atom-for-atom replica of any physical good at zero cost, using zero raw materials, I would expect the market price of those physical goods to drop to zero or near-zero. This is an economic rationalization, not a moral one.
The cost-based pricing is inherently flawed as supply/demand typically governs prices, however digital media tends to stick to whatever tradition dictates, e.g. $60 for a game or $0.99 per song. It is hard to gauge sunk costs for performance art past what it costs to run the studio for X amount of time + whatever salary artists get paid.
That's true. I find myself coming down on the side of "the creator should set the price" rather than the consumer. Digital media is weird in that it's very easy to duplicate the creators work, but as the "supply" is potentially infinite, I'd like the system to be a price/demand ratio, where the cost of the item determines whether the product is consumed, instead of the consumer circumventing the creator to consume the product without remuneration.
Actually, I think it does change precisely when it reaches zero. It's only because of the marketing language of the industry that we are enticed to believe that something that can be copied billions and trillions of times at no cost is some kind of valuable finite artifact.
They are really an old-school industry that needs to die,and be replaced with independent musicians that release songs on YouTube.
YT doesn't squeeze video creators, so he will not squeeze musicians.
Even if YT did, they would be free to move to another platform.
"Can't" is a pretty strong word.
If something isn't available for streaming, it is very likely to be available on DVD or Blu-Ray. Even if the media are region-coded, region-free players may be perfectly legal in your jurisdiction.
I keep seeing this mentioned, but seriously, it was only in 2015 the revenues bottomed out and started to rise again. And it is not anywhere close to its peak in the 90s in real terms, and less so in terms of % spending.
Globally, China's music industry make less than $100M a year. That second largest economy in the world, and its Music revenue is less than half of Thailand.
The industry has changed, and in the west Musicians made much more money in their live performance, K-Pops have all their songs on youtube for free. Chinese Pop stars get much more from advertisement deals and other media. Japanese still loves CDs. A lot of people have grown up to consume music which is totally free.
Revenue didn't bottom out. CD revenue is still on the decline, and digital revenue is still on the decline.
Ever since the age of the first recording, music has worked on a freemium model. Music was free to listen to via the radio (and ad-supported), which acted as an advertisement and upsell for physical (and later digital) media sales.
With the decline of radio and physical media, as well as the democratization of distribution (less hits, revenue spread more evenly), the music industry has been searching for a replacement business model that works.
It looks like they've found it in streaming services.
You have a tiny set of artists like Kanye who effectively own the industry and for the indies its like a $5 a year side income but they spend most of their spare time on it out of pure passion.
Is that considered piracy? YouTube quality is fine for most people (i.e. they either don't care, or don't have gear that's good enough to really hear the difference).
I spent more than 4(!) hours trying to find it... the effort ended past 3am; needless to say how.
Nothing more annoying than false supply limitations on content by service, exclusives, country, various availability windows.
This is the digital age, we have little time for entertainment and need our content on demand. I should be able pay and get what I want to listen to or watch without a false supply constraint to create manipulated demand.
I get why the content owners do it this way, content is king, it is just majorly annoying.
When movies are available on content services I end up not being into the movie at that time, then when I want to watch it the movie is only for purchase. So even with 4 streaming services I end up buying on iTunes or other.
For music, Spotify is doing a pretty good job of having almost everything, but still there are albums that you have to go buy or get.
The friction is so much less when pirating, just go get what you want, I'd pay for a service I could just get anything anytime with no restrictions, so I end up buying lots of movies especially.
Usability and access still favors pirating in many cases which isn't wise for the content industry.
Why is it not possible to buy mp3s? Amazon, play store, iTunes etc. all use no DRM to my knowledge? Or is it just a question of price?
“Piracy” includes grey market media.
Because movie studios, music labels etc. sell exclusive distribution rights to local music cartels, and many of these deals are historical and hard to get out of, e.g. maybe they were 20-30 year contracts made in the mid-90s when nobody was serious about this "Internet" thing.
Which is why Netflix has such a fragmented offering per-country, and why e.g. you might be able to technically buy some song on a CD in India, but it's not available anywhere online, or in the likes of Spotify.
It got a lot better, particularly for anime, because companies were losing money without legal (and timely) distribution, but there's still big hole in music contents.
I guess music from Japan is niche compared to anime. (And worse with something obscure I tend to listen, e.g. anime related music)
Some small subset of musicians and labels are nice enough to put the entire thing on YouTube, but I wish there were an avenue to listen to them just as easy as Spotify, and with decent coverage.
You're on a long walk, absolutely starving and there's a strong possibility you won't get to eat for a while. A guy by the road is selling apples - with the small amount of cash you have on you, you could afford 4 or 5, enough to fill you up. Across the road there's an empty looking house set far back from the road, with an apple tree right in the yard at the front. Hundreds of apples have fallen on the ground - it's no biggie to lean over the fence and grab a handful of apples. No one is in the house, the guy selling apples isn't watching, what do you do?
Of course, you _are_ starving, and you do have some money, which you'd be prepared to spend on food. Now assume that next to the apple seller is a small cafe - the menu is vast and you can eat as much as you want of pretty much any kind of food. You pay once and if you stop in on the way back you can eat again. Now what do you do?
I'm guessing this has to do with labels and their distribution rights.
I was going to ask the same thing - specifically about Amazon, which sells non-DRM, standard mp3s - but it occurs to me this might only be in the United States.
What does mp3 purchasing from Amazon look like from other countries ? Just a vastly different catalog ? The same catalog but with DRM files ?
Speaking from a UK perspective, everything I've purchased from Amazon UK has been provided as DRM-free MP3. Amazon UK (and possibly elsewhere) has an AutoRip feature where CD purchases are also added as gratis downloads. This extends to prior purchases, too – I was a bit wary about downloading some items since they were bought as gifts for people via their wishlist…and yet since I was the purchaser, I was the presumed licence holder…but didn't have the CD in my possession. The same goes for CDs that I'd bought, listened to and subsequently sold, which presumably transfers the licence to the new holder of the CD…and yet I can still download the album via Amazon Music. Tricky.
For Finland and most other countries, it is not possible to purchase digital music (or movies/shows, for that matter) from Amazon.
If I try to purchase an MP3 from the US site (amazon.com), I get "We were unable to process your order with the current payment information. Please click 'Continue' to select a default payment method and 1-Click address."
Clicking "Continue" just gets me back to the item page, so even the error messaging is broken. OTOH Amazon Video has a proper error message about needing a US payment method.
Amazon does offer the Amazon Music Unlimited subscription service here, though, and I believe it has a catalog comparable to other services (but I'm not a user).
By non-Bollywood, do you mean music in other Indian languages or popular English music? Amazon Prime and Apple Music seem to have something in other languages, though nobody seems to have everything (without ads and a bad experience). Amazon Prime (with video, music and books) is Rs.999 a year, while Apple Music is Rs.120 a month.
For those not familiar with India, there are 22 official languages (you can see them on the currency notes) and about a 1000 dialects. Popular music is still mostly from movies, and the country produces more than a 1000 movies a year across different languages.
Compared to that, Bandcamp is heaven. A tiny one though I'm happy to pay for.
Western music mostly. I took a gaana.com subscription to find that its rock/metal music catalogue had big holes in it. And as you said even for bollywood music the experience is not that good.
Do you guys have devices like that in India?
Seriously, exclusive rights to music creation and reproduction are a pretty new thing; I think humanity will survive this "recent" trend.
If anybody ever tries to control some other person's activity in this way, and it happens to be my music that's at issue, that will certainly not be an appropriate position to take vis a vis my creation. (Not that my music is really worth anything to anyone, except maybe my song at DjangoCon 2012 :-) ).
I just don't understand how these ideas have even become so pervasive. The idea that I can own a song (or any data) to the exclusion of preventing someone from copying bytes from one drive to another... it's just so strange.
--
[0] - with the possible exception of pharmaceuticals.
My current and somewhat layman opinion is that we need to take a serious look at the duration of patent protection. For instance in software, a patent longer than 2-3 years is IMO absurd, and just serves to enrich the patent owner while retarding the progress of technology. Similar calculation could be made for other industries, based on typical time-to-market and rate of progress. The application process should IMO be also more strict, to a) not let through so many patents on obvious things, and b) ensure that patent description actually allows to reproduce the invention. Lastly, we need to find a way to stop companies from stockpiling patents as if they were nuclear weapons.
And speaking of that, I wish regulators could also take a look at the duration of copyright protection, and curb the practice of extending it in perpetuity.
Yes, precisely that. If you see the problem of patents as a cost/benefit analysis and not black-and-white issue, it's not surprising that the system may be socially useful in some sectors, but not for others.
As for alternative systems of funding drug research, this is a separate topic. I'd all for abolishing pharmaceutical patents if a different effective method of funding would be available.
EDIT and lest you think I'm a fan of big pharma business, I'm not. I abhor the trickery they pull with marketing to doctors, or flipping an inert fragment of a molecule and patenting it again. But I'm inclined to cut them some slack as the society needs new drugs.
Also, you forgot about the other part of the purpose of patents - to allow the public to benefit from the innovation, by making it public domain after patent protection expires. Increasingly, patents don't hold that end of the bargain, by being deliberately written in such a vague form as to be useless as a blueprint.
Back to the topic of pharma - this is the only case I know where I feel that cost/benefit of patents favors keeping them. Everywhere else, I feel things would be better if we abolished them, or at least severely reduced their duration.
There is no law forcing a person or company to file for a patent. They are free to keep their trade secrets a secret forever, if they want.
As for guaranteeing the invention will be public knowledge, these days it's just bait-and-switch.
The dream of licensing is not a perversion of the patent system, it's part of the point: to get inventions out of people's heads and secret workshops, and into forms that benefit the public at large.
I mean, by that standard, the entire legal system, not to mention having state police departments vs random mob justice, are also pretty new things. Do you think that we can do away with those too cause they're new?
Do you give any credence to the idea that part of the reason the last few hundred years have been incredibly productive for humanity (both in terms of general economic welfare, but also art), is partly because of things like the patent/IP system? I'd be happy to know why not, if not.
Copyright dates back to about the invention of the printing press, so about 600 years old. Common law has a good 400 years on that (and law itself, a couple thousand years on common law). Copyright is a baby by comparison. And given that it was functionally co-birthed with the printing press (since before that time, every copy was a blessing---a work of hand-crafted art someone had bothered to invest substantive human toil into because they thought a thing deserved to be recorded in more than one place), I don't think I have the tools to divide the benefits to society of copyright law from the benefits to society of mass, cheap reproduction of writeable concepts. It may have helped. It probably helped more in some spaces than in others. But by-and-large, it provided a system for a person to go live the "life of the mind" and exchange art for money instead of something else, and it's unclear to me that copyright did more than, say, the patronage system to that end.
... all of which is divorceable from the concept of, God help us, exclusive rights to perform a work, which is the weird space music lives in. Because we don't even charge by the written copy there; we often charge (to the best of the ability of the copyright holder) for every instance of "reading" the record and re-broadcasting it into someone's ears.
Yes, I think one can build a case that the cost of upkeep, overhead, tracking, and maintenance to move money around in that system offsets the benefit to society. I think it's incumbent upon the rent-holders and copyright owners to explain how, absent their Byzantine system of moving money around, our public spaces would be silent and dead, devoid of creative works.
The history of humanity and our simple desire to sing makes that strike me as profoundly unlikely.
> I think it's incumbent upon the rent-holders and copyright owners to explain how, absent their Byzantine system of moving money around, our public spaces would be silent and dead, devoid of creative works.
The history of humanity and our simple desire to sing makes that strike me as profoundly unlikely.
I don't think anyone seriously makes that claim (or at least, I don't). I think my claims were:
1. On a practical level, this is economics 101 - if we up the reward for creative works, we'll get more creative works.
2. On a moral level, as long as we are in this capitalistic system, I think that one person creating value should have the same reward as another person creating value, and just because one happens to be easily copied and one doesn't, shouldn't make a difference. I can't find a moral reason to say to someone that, should they choose to become an author instead of building furniture, and should they happen to create works that please millions, they shouldn't get rewarded for that.
You make it seem like the rent-holders and copyright owners have never explained why they want the system - but these things have been discussed since the dawn of the IP system. For one thing, have you talked to authors/musicians/etc and asked their views?
I particularly remember reading a British parliament member talking a lot about this issue, including the problems with patronage and the problem with pirating - in the 1800s!
Until the dominant form of distribution allows people to OWN their music, I believe that piracy will persist.
I enjoy going to art museums and experiencing visual art, but I never experienced the inclination to purchase any of it. Music to me is a lot like that.
Even in the case where you buy a song, you don't have limitless rights to it. It would be illegal, for example, to buy a CD and use a song from that CD in a television commercial. You don't own the song, you are purchasing the right to replay the song in some situations. DRM purchases and streaming services are remarkably similar deals.
Because I don't trust the owners of the content to not destroy[1] or permanently alter[2] it in some way.
Mass distribution is necessary for preservation.
[1] 1937 Fox vault fire. 1965 MGM vault fire. BBC TV programs 1967-1978.
[2] The OCN of all three original Star Wars films.
If I can't play a very particular song at a particular time because of DRM - that's a big negative.
Piracy for the most part is used by 2 types of people :
1. Those who would never have bought the product because of lack of income to do so.
2. Those who find the product to hard to access.
Steam is an excellent example of dealing with both. Steam sales and location specific prices solve problem 1. Everything one platform everywhere in the world solves 2.
Maybe not for big labels/artists, but if they did something like Greenlight for indie bands... I could see it working... Maybe.
Or am I way off here?
It never even occurred to me that they would sell music so no wonder they are bad a it, at least for now.
Only TV and film really holds out. I just can't get my favorite shows in any sensible fashion, and so much just isn't even available to me. Netflix where I live at times feels like a waste of money save for a few favorite originals.
TV especially is just awful, a lot of my favorite shows simply can't be had for any price, because of arbitrary exclusivity deals, time delays, bad organization, and region locking nonsense. Even if I cared for any of the local content here in my country, it's all spread out over multiple streaming sites, and quite a lot isn't available or has random availability.
Playing a cracked game is less likely to work and more effort than playing a pirated mp3, which is a large part of the reason that Steam cut down so heavily on pirated games.
I still buy some music even though I subscribe to Apple Music.
But if I were coming from a place where I was starting out and owned no music, I might think differently.
Pandora first, but I can't remember if I had completely stopped using mp3 at that point. I maybe had an iPod full of music I didn't pay for. Can't really remember the timelines here.
Either way, just like with movie and TV, I'll happily pay for streaming if the selection is there.
This. A million times.
...
“Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular.”
—Joel Spolsky, “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You,” 2001
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
———
In the last 17 years, that quote keeps popping up because the companies that focus on letting you type the name of a song and listen to it right away have made money, while those that introduce friction to support some label’s business model? Not so much.
But they keep complaining about “piracy.” 90% of piracy is eliminating friction.
This past weekend, I bought the new Doctor Who on iTunes. I paid because Apple gave me a lot of ways to type the name of the show and watch it right away. Same reason I’ve spent thousands on music with them.
It’s not about the price, it’s about the convenience.
Which is why I don't. No King Crimson, no cool small alternative bands, and no good way to find out of the bands you like are on spotify before getting a subscription. Furthermore: the service pays fuck all to artists. I may as well use the money to go to their concerts and buy merch directly from the artists.
For instance Spotify is not available in many countries including Ukraine and India. The latter having a population of 1.3 billion people. GPM and Apple Music are better in that regard but nevertheless.
That being said, I also like owning my music. As files. On my own devices. Running "fair trade" operating systems that let me do that.
You surely could. Go to a store and buy a Spotify gift card with cash.
I personally live in Germany, in the middle of my live, with kids and a big household etc. and have never used a credit card, nor have I undergone a single situation where I needed one.
Seriously, give me a reason to trust these things, because I rather manage with what I have instead, and so far with little trouble. With what I'd call the upside of me consuming as little as possible from the international money mobsters. I do need some hardware once in a while, and the options there really could be better.
If you create something that can be copied endlessly at near-zero cost, and you don't want others enjoying it "for free", then you need to charge an appropriate price for the initial publication. You have every right to keep it to yourself, and to charge whatever price you deem fair in exchange for the service of revealing it to others, but once you've done that it's rightfully out of your hands.
For example this game I picked at random goes from $19 in USA to as low as $6 in Argentina: https://steamdb.info/app/440900/
In all seriousness, i like to own my music and i love bandcamp. I'm pretty poor so yeah a large part of my collection is stolen from the shores of india. But just like books, when i have some extra money i will buy from artists who i love listening too. If i was rich i would buy everything, but i am not and i still want to listen too music.
I don't have a bank account here, so I can't pay for a 2 year subscription for 4G. I also don't have a job. I'm grateful for my offline music collection keeping me alive right now. Music is especially important when times are tough, and it's in those difficult times that money and subscription-level stability are hard to find.
Similar organisations were until recently engaged in shakedowns of small businesses for even playing the radio. Even after this was ruled illegal in Europe we used to still get a letter every year demanding we pay up for the benefits music was bringing our business.
Apply your logic to any other purchase and it falls on it feet. Do you only buy food direct from farmers? Clothes from factories? Do you only use supermarkets that use open source payment kiosks?
I bet they really care about about the software license for the source code for the store you buy their music from...
Maybe try just enjoying music for musics sake and not thinking about where it comes from to much, you might enjoy it!
I get that this isn't directly the artist's fault and I understand that a lot of people don't care about this kind of freedom, but I certainly wouldn't blame someone for wanting to opt-out, even if that means they don't support artists that require the use of proprietary software to buy their music.
I think it is unfair to the artists as you are using something that is entirely out of their control to justify not supporting them.
> I mean watching YouTube videos would clearly not meet your requirements
Actually, it does. Most YouTube videos don't have DRM, and they can be viewed with free software (web browsers are free software, also youtube-dl is free software.)
> neither would watching Netflix...
Yeah, Netflix certainly doesn't, but I have no problems with buying Blu-ray. Blu-ray has DRM, but it's easily removed, so it's equivalent to not having DRM for practical purposes. (Again, I don't know if I'm as stringent as the GP in this case.)
> I think it is unfair to the artists as you are using something that is entirely out of their control to justify not supporting them.
They certainly do have control over which record contracts they sign and which television studios and networks they work for. If they want to make a quick buck at the expense of the consumer by making an exclusivity deal with Apple Music or Netflix, I'm probably not going to buy what they're selling.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, you might have to steal it to make the copy. Your analogy is useless for this argument. Money might be an abstract concept but bills and coins aren't imaginary. Try an analogy with digital currency then maybe there be something to talk about, but I'm guessing anything you can come up with will actually be talking about "hacking" or "fraud", not "stealing".
Why bending the meaning of words?
Musicians are stiffed by the record labels, not by the fans. The fans are the ones that keep them rich, keep them popular, buy their shirts and go to their $200/seat concerts. At worst, their records are loss-leaders for an even more lucrative business.
It used to be common practice for governments to tax owners of radios (and TV sets later on). So music certainly hasn't always been freely available on the radio.
That being said, if you're sending EM waves through my property, why the hell shouldn't I be allowed tp copy them?
To further my point: not every artist is a mega-millionaire. There are countless small bands/artists where every sale counts towards them actually earning a living off of music.
it's hardly as clear cut as you are making it. if I have an apple and you take it, I no longer have the apple. if I have five apples and you take one, I have four left. it's hard to imagine you taking something from me that I will still possess afterwards in the same quantity. I would argue that the sense in which most people use "take" does not include copying.
to further my point: the law in the US, a bastion of copyright enforcement, clearly recognizes the difference between theft (a criminal offense) and copyright infringement (a civil offense). you can't go to jail for piracy.
Presumably infinite quantities of a something like an album shouldn't suggest that it's worthless. Resources have been invested into it's creation. Artists should be able to recoup some of their investment with album sales.
If it's okay to "copy" music, than the same argument can be made for every other digital product. Games, films, and essentially all software.
when i was teenager / college student i never thought piracy was wrong, mainly because of the "well i wouldn't have paid for it anyway" argument. now that i'm a software dev, i have plenty of money for music and movies and i realize that my own livelihood depends on IP protection. i can't justify it so easily anymore.
I actually recall something out of the Regan Administration where a similar scenario actually ended up with numbers of 20 out of 50 - however that was largely speculative and not officially confirmed.
I used Limewire back in the day. I couldn't tell you how many songs in my collection were artist credit "System of a Down." I think I had a System of a Down copy of the 1812 Overture in there somewhere.
(It is also possible that legit channels are over-counted in the data because they're easier to explicitly audit. If the error factor estimate is the same for legit and bootleg channels, the data will reach the wrong conclusions).
I find the music I want by reading community based sources like Last.fm, RateYourMusic, genre-specialist website, reviews on personal blogs, and magazines/web publications I trust (e.g. the Quietus).
Thankfully sites like Bandcamp is still around, and offer a decent way to discover new artists and get DRM-free downloads, no questions asked.
Yeah, I got spoiled into thinking that you got to listen to stuff before you forked out for some of it. I liked that model a lot better than paying for a streaming service. My guess is that's still a fine model for most people.
Good DJ's prove their qualifications with every record they spin. I don't need an ISP and a subscription. The genre I like is music written by talented composers and performed by talented musicians. What's the name of that playlist?
I consider myself a pirate, without shame. My first games on C64 were pirated and since then I've been involved in piratbyrån and the swedish pirate party.
But I make enough money now to use Google Play Music and rarely pirate music these days. Mostly movies, shows and audiobooks.
So since this article specifically mentions music I make the assumption that it's not talking about my world.
A vast majority of people around me use streaming services for music today.
But I have friends in Thailand and Vietnam and there it's quite common to see pirated movies playing on long bus rides with VIP bus lines for example.
I also have friends on Croatia and Bosnia and there it's also still very common to go to a neighborhood pirate who will provide you with CDs of your favorite artists.
So I would be much less surprised if they were still pirating music in these places rather than using streaming services.
So there's a big world out there with an ever growing connected population, Africa, Asia, South America, and I'd speculate that they're driving up those numbers.
I think the best way to address piracy is with strong copyright reform. Specifically, once content is sold for mass consumption, it needs to make its way into streaming services. Things like artificial scarcity need to be phased out.
The problem is the intermediary. People don't want to give money to labels. It's a little like buying food to your local producer.
I guess even Bandcamp makes money.
Consumers would rather pirate than see a fraction of their money land on some accountant desk for copyright management. Content is easily copiable, and did someone to live on their content doesn't require a high price.
In the digital age i don't see how an album could cost more than $5, or even $1 or $2 if you're not a full time artist.
Louie CK made millions that way, I agree that he was already popular though.
Just let people set their price (Radiohead did that), and advertise that method on a clean torrent, I'm sure people would pay.
Is this absolutely crazy? Yes.
Only in some legal systems. E.g. in some countries you can make a backup copy of a software you bought.
I believe eventually this will happened, and you wont be able to market or even program a non-cloud monitored player.
This will be accompanied by ratcheting up of subscription cost.
This dystopian situation was exactly predicted by rms more than 20 years ago [1].
I like to “own” my music, so it was appealing- DRM free, album art and metadata formatted correctly.
But then they nerfed the ever loving shit out of the music app on my phone and force fed me Apple Music. Since I ideologically disagree with that model I went back to the old ways of CDs and luckily I have Plex which handles my music on my phone now.
It’s not as nice as before but it’s better than being forced into a subscription.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2018/08/02/number-britons-illegall...
This doesn't make sense. A premium subscription service doesn't give you access offline, and usually won't help with cellular data caps.
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/the_basics/list...
Have a real DRM-free shop instead please. Without idiotic user unfriendly lawyer requiring license to use.
[1] https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1250232?hl...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Or maybe it was because I was younger and had a finite amount of pocket money to spend on an infinite amount of desires.
But streaming has definitely made it lots easier to access music.
Today a Youtube playlist is often enough for me.
Ever since the last of the "real" pirates was hanged, the pirate has become a fictional archetype from the Age of Sail. The pirate is now a form of self-governing rebel against authority, an era-appropriate gangster with a heart ranging from black as coal to something far short of a heart of gold--gilded brass, at best. They make great anti-heroes. They cheat, but the game was already rigged.
Contrast with navies and marine corps that also attack ships and kill people, but do so under the aegis of state-sanctioned legitimacy. And they have a strict, authoritarian command hierarchy, rather than the freewheeling pirate charters that only invested absolute authority in the captain during the heat of combat.
It certainly doesn't help that the libertarian crowd with fantasies of living statelessly (unflagged vessels) in international waters (seasteading) would be considered by the law of the sea to be legally indistinguishable from pirates.
Your pleas are therefore likely to go unheeded, because "pirate" is indeed a loaded term, but it isn't loaded with a powder charge and 9-inch iron ball, not by a long shot. Pirates are now the proto-punks, the anti-authoritarian rebels of the sea. They are the ultimate self-interested libertarians, looting those who are plundering the new world colonies and shipping the silver back home to the king.
As media distributors have colonized the new world of artists that work in recordings that can be duplicated endlessly with little effort, the new pirates rebel against their copyrights and plunder the ships filled with gold, bound for Wall Street and City of London. The metaphor is just too apt.
I get that it's a tactic used by the business end of things, but it's where we're at now.
More pawsuits it is!
(Man, can I hold a grudge for a long time)
Public domain should be the rule and copyright the exception.
This is already the case for most of the music that many people are interested in (e.g., Bach, Vivaldi).
And you can very easily find them. Most moderately well-known compositions have been transcribed into pdf using modern typography (say, with lilypond) and uploaded to imslp and similar sites.
[1] https://imslp.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Concerto_No.5_in_D_major,...
Personally I am interested in the notes, so I'll point out that most of the sheet music for Bach and Vivaldi is in fact under copyright. If you want something out of copyright then you have to get a facsimile of an old edition. Or something that was typeset by an amateur, which will almost certainly be crap because typesetting music takes a lot of skill to do well.
John Ruskin: 'The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?'
Whistler: 'No. I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.'
You would be ok with your employer using the same argument when they paid you ?
Why? In what other area does the public automaticallt get a right to something someone else created?
If you make a chair and I buy it from you, I can do whatever I want with that chair.
Before 1989, copyright was also opt-in. Check out the timeline under "Notable Dates in United States Copyright" https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1a.html It's a mess of shifting categories and retroactive extensions.
The content that we create does not exist in a vacuum- humans create for the overall good of society. Everything you see and use day-to-day is an incredible amalgamation of thoughts and ideas woven together from centuries of our past and present collective knowledge.
The notion that an individual or organization can maintain exclusive control of "intellectual property" in perpetuity stands at odds with thousands of years of human history. Modern patent and copyright law seems to have forgotten this.
(And musicians don't get a big enough cut either.)
NewPipe (A free lightweight YouTube frontend for Android.) - https://f-droid.org/app/org.schabi.newpipe