About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...
Its long been known that the way to defeat piracy is to offer a better service. Its what Steam did, its what Netflix did.
Ironically, the fragmentation of those ecosystems is bringing it back. Piracy is the ultimate invisible hand on the entertainment distribution industry.
How would streaming become the only game in town? Piracy and any other online mischief are being stamped out the hard way, by taking control of our technology from us. Approved operating system, approved drivers, approved software, approved browser, approved websites, no piracy, no privacy, no deviance.
For example, Justin Beiber, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, were all discovered independently due to their own efforts and had decent success on their own. (Farther back in time, the Beatles and most classic rock bands similarly got signed to labels after demonstrating success.)
But they're all signed to major labels now, because touring is expensive, and the scale of exposure you get with a label is very different from what you get on your own, and the income correspondingly increases as well.
In many (but not all) cases, the artists usually also get lump-sum advances against new albums or singles which removes the financial risks for creating new music.
Piracy was never about discovery. It was simply about people being too cheap to pay for other people's work. Sometimes, as with Adobe and Microsoft, they were okay with it because that just locked in their market dominance and created more future customers. But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy has a notable impact on creator's earnings.
The traditional business model of a record label is almost entirely obsolete, and they need new revenue streams. That said, the people who run these businesses are antithetical to innovation and creativity in business and that's why industry groups like the RIAA exist in the first place.
Do you have any data that doesn't make the ridiculous and false assertion that 1 download = 1 lost sale, with which to back that claim?
Because from what I've read, piracy has the opposite effect.
From what I can tell, most of the studies establishing a clear economic cost to piracy tend to rely on numbers originating from the music industry without clear attribution to data, or by naïve analyses estimating that 1 download = X lost sales, without considering effects like budgetary limits (I'll spend at most $X on entertainment this year) or conversions to profitable sales.
Additionally, there's a lot fewer studies on piracy post-revenue nadir. It seems as if the rise of streaming has caused the industry to stop panicking so much about piracy, and there's some evidence that streaming has converted consumers to paying customers.
All-in-all, I would say that it's not so much that piracy hurt the industry as piracy filled the existence of a market segment that the industry refused to fill. Piracy only hurt the industry in the same way digital cameras hurt Kodak: the existing business model was unsustainable, but they refused to pivot to take advantage of the clear coming shift in the business model.
But it's well-documented that piracy negatively affects music, film, and game studio income. See, e.g., https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-sound...
Piracy may the opposite effect for software but it definitely has a negative effect on entertainment related IP.
https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...
https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...
High school events where I grew up were basically an iMac with the student body officers' MP3 collections and a PA system. All the pirated MP3s people were playing at those various official and unofficial gatherings of my youth led to me buying CDs once I had money of my own.
Has a non-industry-affiliated research group produced causal data (not just declining sales figures) showing that noncommercial entertainment piracy is a net harm?
IPI is an associate member of the State Policy Network (SPN), a network of right-wing "think tanks" and other non profits spanning 49 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.[2]
The conservative Capital Research Center ranked IPI as amongst the most conservative groups in the US, scoring it as an "eight" on a scale of one to eight.[3] IPI has received funding from corporations like Exxon Mobil and organizations like the Kochs' Claude R. Lambe Foundation, Scaife Foundations, the Bradley Foundation and others....
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Institute_for_Po...