Almost every single person I knew back in the day who installed Limewire/Kazaa/Bearshare, bought an R4 cartridge or modded their Wii went from buying at least a couple of pieces of genuine media each year to never buying one again.
That being said, perhaps a more useful metric for calculating lost sales would be how many people acquired the technology used for piracy, rather than how many times they used it.
The biggest issue is and always will be accessibility and ease of access and these two are hindered by outdated global licensing agreements.
If you sell be a DVD with DRM that takes longer to start playing than a copy I downloaded. I will download it. If you force me to watch unskipable 10 year old ads before I can play my purchased DVD I will pirate that movie.
I can't think of any that stopped honestly or even owned an Apple product. Apple products are expensive.
If you wanted just that one song then iTunes was very much the most affordable, and accessible, way to legally buy digital music back then because it only charged you $1 for a song.
The only other alternatives where, often legally rather obscure, flatrate subscription models or buying the physical full album, which would usually have cost you at least $20+
Valve did something very similar with Steam: Very easy to use and it actually passed on the savings from digital distribution to the consumers by heavily discounting the prices of games.
I wish buying movies was this easy.
I wasn't aware that iTunes offered downloads via a website back then, because iTunes certainly does not run on the OS which the people that I'm thinking of used at the time (and still doesn't).
Apple does not allow you to "buy" music, only to rent it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090106080722/http://www.apple....
> (xii) iTunes Plus Products do not contain security technology that limits your usage of such Products, and Usage Rules (iii) – (vi) do not apply to iTunes Plus Products. You may copy, store and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use.
Nowadays it's impossible to find mp3. I have a Spotify premium account, so I can download music, but not in a format that lets me burn it on a CD. So basically I pay 10 euro a month and I don't even have the freedom to listen to the music on whatever device I prefer.
I miss the old days where you could find everything to pirate. These days thanks god there is Telegram that lets me download some mp3 in decent quality, otherwise I have to download YouTube videos and the audio quality is awful (but probably most people will not notice since they have crappy stereos in the first place).
Seems like there's a lot of countries where Apple doesn't even operate the iTunes Music Store too which is surprising to me. Like Albania and Iceland.
It's weird how at the same time the lack of option to legally download and burn CD and the lack of optical players "if there is no way of legaly watching the content piracy is the only way. (and importing expensive DVDs in an erra where literally none of my devices have optical bays is not actual option)" lead to the same conclusion: pirating.
> I miss the old days where you could find everything to pirate. These days thanks god there is Telegram that lets me download some mp3 in decent quality, otherwise I have to download YouTube videos and the audio quality is awful (but probably most people will not notice since they have crappy stereos in the first place).
Amen to that. Just yesterday I bought two tracks from https://christophertin.com/projects/civilizationvi.html (it's not the link I used, that one led to gumstore something which allows me to download FLAC tracks) and today I can't even find the store link.
I tried to buy in the same way the whole album but there are no "download" options.
Every albums/EPs has different streaming options but there are no download options for everything.
I ended up using youtube-dl on the music.youtube.com and I can clearly hear the differences. I suspect these tracks are amputated from some instruments or settings.
I have met precisely one person in real life who does this, and he was far enough on the Autism spectrum to receive a government-funded integration aide for the first 6 years of school.
Every other person I know pirates because it's easier than acquiring the real product, they can get a pirated version before the official version is released, or they just simply want to save money.
I personally pirate because I can't be bothered looking through 6 different streaming apps to see which one has Terminator 2 on it. Apparently I'm not alone in this regard; piracy has started to rise again since everybody pulled their content from Netflix.
Yes, it's just anecdata, but I would be shocked if more than 5% of pirates intended to purchase genuine copies of the media they actually liked.
Maybe because Greece is broke? :P
But seriously, I wasn't trying to imply that everybody who uses piracy to demo things need help - it's just extremely uncommon/unusual to buy a piece of genuine media when you already having a working pirate copy.
I cannot help but laugh at this original and non-facile joke I have definitely not heard a million times before.
> it's just extremely uncommon/unusual to buy a piece of genuine media when you already having a working pirate copy.
Probably, but in my case I don't play games often, so if I buy something I'll end up ignoring it after a few minutes 99% of the time. Pirating and buying after I finish is a good way to tell for sure if I'll like it before I buy.
Well, shit. There's another comment to recall at random intervals for the next 10 years and blush with embarrassment even though nobody else is around.
I agree, but I think this actually depends on the media. I do buy my technical books ($50-$150/a piece), but I want to take a look at them first before purchasing.
I had forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to transfer a DVD to something usable in modern times like Plex or Emby, it is something like a 8 dvd box set I think I have gotten like 2 of the DVD ripped at this point
justwatch.com will solve that for you, and covers quite a few countries. Between Netflix, Hulu, and "Rent for $4 on Amazon" I can almost always find an option unless it's a Disney+ / Showtime / whatever exclusive.
$25-40/mo (depending on how often I have to invoke the "rent" option) seems pretty reasonable compared to cable.
And yet, a significant proportion of shows isn’t available for me on either of these, and requires maxdome, sky, whatever other bullshit which I’ll never subscribe to. I’m spending enough money each month on streaming that, if something isn’t on there, I’ll just pirate it.
Damn. Let me know if you ever host movie nights, I'll come over :3
Its like this https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sert_-_3_smile.svg
If anything, that picture seems to be a desperate attempt at retrofitting something, no matter what exactly, onto the smiley -- just look at the name: "3smile".
(So I think I'll stick to "ballsack with eyes".)
EDIT - Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27849412
But often enough, I still need to rip blu rays to get proper, high quality versions of movies that otherwise aren't available at all, so movie night can end up with glitches from my custom setup
At one point i dumped Amazon Fire because all the services didnt support it and only seemed to support Google. Now its switched, I'm not buying all new hardware again.
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consu...
I personally prefer paying because I can decide what to watch on a whim, on 4k, without keeping a stash with several TB of movies I might never end up watching (like I did before Netflix) which I then have to copy or stream from another computer to my Apple TV to watch. Not even talking about the PITA of having to keep up with working tracker sites, mirrors, etc.
I understand pirating because of the price, or availability, but in terms of comfort streaming has won me over some years ago.
I have been burned too many times by games that simply do not run on my hardware despite meeting the minimum specs for the game. Modern platforms like Steam may allow for refunds, but this is a relatively new thing. Shareware and demos are a fantastic thing for someone like me, but these mostly seem to have gone away in favor of Let's Play and other videos of gameplay, which does nothing to help me determine if I can actually play the game.
I would never have made many of my purchases without that option.
It’s really a convenience and accessibility issue.
I've given up on music in general. I'll listen to the radio in the car, but that's it. If I really want to here a song, its on Youtube somewhere.
For example, having to go through every streaming app to work out which one has the show you want, or buying a piece of hardware sold by an American that hasn't even thought about logistics to any country that isn't the USA.
Piracy for convenience happens again.
I tried following my linear algebra course using freely available materials and/or 2nd hand text books, but constant "new" editions and access to online study portals made 2nd hand books impractical.
As a student, I didn't really buy the "piracy increases sales" studies, since I went from buying one thing a year to zero. Clearly, sales were lost.
As an adult, I can casually swipe my credit card and buy similar things on a whim. How much less I bought as a student is a rounding error.
Most people or organizations are either rich enough to not bother with piracy, or poor enough not to buy especially much in the first place.
I'll mention this is doubly true with industrial software. Ain't no way an individual will drop $5k on a CAD program. On the other hand, ain't no way a serious business will pirate a $5k CAD program. Having people know how to use your tools, though, drives sales.
Partially disagree. For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels. For example, when I want to download a music video, I can just go on youtube and I can download the video with one click (using "unofficial" software). If I wanted to use "official" channels to purchase a copy of the music video, I would have to spend a lot of time just finding out which service sells it, then figure out if they actually sell this piece of music or merely rent it out, then figure out a method to register and pay, etc. In the end I have no idea if I will even acquire a mp4 file or some kind of DRM time bomb.
I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.
> For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels.
> I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.
True. Note that the text you quoted referred to "acquiring the product". Streaming audio from Spotify temporarily is different from "acquiring" the audio file. Do you think acquiring audio files via official channels is somehow less of a hassle than acquiring them via unofficial channels, like youtube-dl?
How old were the people back in the day? In high school I pirated a lot more because I literally had no money.
Interesting, “work” is kind of ambiguous in that sentence. Either it means the labor or it means the artistic creation.
Anyways I want to think that there are a multitude of ways to allow global unfettered reach of the latter while ensuring the former has adequate funding.
I mean everyone is free to buy practically any pizza, in practically any form, from practically anyone, and still people get paid to come up with novel recipes.
For digital media I think YouTube and GitHub are the type of space to focus on. Compared to Spotify they are almost the kind of free services one could imagine a copyright free Netflix and Spotify could look like.
You don’t find many multi million dollar productions on the ad-financed YouTube. (You do on the completely free GitHub though). It would be interesting to find out if there are other models for YouTube-like media to get access to that kind of funds, pretty sure ads aren’t it, and copyright seems to lead to the Netflix problem.
Patreon and selling merch does it share to finance the channels I watch. But also seems limited in what can be expected.
LWN has this interesting freemium model of keeping the latest edition for subscribers only (unless they share a link), it’s kind of what Kickstarter things do too no? Some extra perks for those is provide t he funding.
Personally I would be happy to pay for “premium” YouTube subscriptions for channels doing a LWN like thing. Would probably prefer to do that through a meta-subscription service (like patreon?) built into the consumption experience to lower the barrier.
For music I see no reason these models shouldn’t be adequate. Film could be a bit mor problematic, seems like those are being replaced with series anyways though, so perhaps a good pilot is enough to secure funding for subsequent episodes.
It is both. Just recording music involves lots of non-creative setup and editing work, and filming typically involves a lot of logistics, set building and other non-creative labor. Equipment isn't free either even if it's not as exclusive as it used to be.
Soundcloud and Bandcamp kind of work for music, but somehow it seems that most of the artists who can get a traditional recording or distribution deal prefer going that way. I've understood that before copyright a rich patron was common way of funding art. I'm just not sure if I'd enjoy watching tech billionaires' pet projects.
Yeah, streaming Netflix doesn't look as good as a Bluray but it looks better than a DVD or cable TV which most people are still happy with.
What's often far more noticeable is all the ways that the music is altered during production. How it's recorded, mixed and mastered. You'd be surprised what kinds of sources still get used as part of the mix today. Someone using an unshielded quarter inch cable to record a guitar amp is far more likely to contribute noise than Opus. Or a producer using Abbey Road Vinyl or iZotope. Or whoever uses some "free sample pack" that originated from an MP3 re-encoding of a poor rip of Best Service Gigapack. It's all out there.
This was even laid out explicitly in a recent leak from a former Spotify boss: https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-doesnt-need-str...
> The problem was this: piracy and music distribution. The problem was to get artists' music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.