If they spent it on providing a no-bullshit, reasonably priced platform that provides access to their whole catalog, then they would be making a lot more money than they would from lawsuits, and piracy would be virtually non-existent.
If you were correct we would have stuck with everything being on Netflix and Spotify for $10/mo each because it keeps piracy rates down. In practice, while piracy rates have gone back up, they don't hurt the bottom lines of publishers as much as they've claimed[0], at least relative to how much they make from people buying multiple subscriptions. But the law allows them to continue crying crocodile tears about how much money they're losing from old sound recordings being on an archive site.
[0] In other words, one pirate copy is not one lost sale
That's exactly the kind of shit that drives people to piracy. Then they try to recoup their falling revenue with litigation. It's stupid.
I also don't believe streaming has been that bad for revenue. The financial shenanigans they go through to avoid paying artists, writers and more are insane. It's part of the whole impetus behind the current strikes.
Now, I do agree that “one pirate number doesn’t necessarily equate to one lost sale”. But that’s not what you’re arguing.
Pirates have been saying this for decades, and yet despite content being easier than ever, with pricing falling faster than ever (non-streaming services), piracy is as healthy as ever. If what you were saying is true, you’d expect piracy to have fallen as different people’s barriers for “cheap and easy” were broken through, but that’s not what’s observed.
The ways that music piracy occurs has changed, for sure.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15764/prevalence-of-music...
One thing I did find is that, for some reason, Covid saw a drop in music piracy. That has nothing to do with the claim that “since Spotify released (2011), music piracy is non existent”, though. I didn’t bother to read on idea of why that occurred.
https://musically.com/2021/12/13/online-music-piracy-declini...
And Spotify might have released in 2011 but it went mainstream around late 2010s.
While the situation is obviously messier with video, it's also the case that many of us don't feel a burning need to watch most specific content and are fine with having access to enough stuff we want to watch without hassle.
Some context for the younger HN audience: a CD used to cost $15-20 new and almost no artist in the US sold singles. If you wanted a song you heard on the radio you needed to go to one or more record stores to find the CD and pay your $15. Rarely did you get to sample anything on the CD at the store. So you'd get home only to realize you essentially paid $15 for one stupid song. Hopefully you liked half the songs on the album so you were maybe paying $3 per song you liked. Ripping that CD to MP3 was also more time invested.
Even over a 28.8k dial-up downloading the same song of Napster would only take about twenty minutes.
As the various online music stores showed, money wasn't the main issue with Napster et al. People were fine paying for music so long as it was convenient. By the early 00s buying CDs was far from convenient for how people actually wanted to listen to music. Music streaming is just the latest convenience since everyone has an Internet connected device in their pocket and their "library" is just every song in the service's catalog.
Yeah, mobile probably played a role as well. Even if you have a few TB of music reasonably cataloged on a USB drive at home, that doesn't do you a huge amount of good when you're somewhere where you only have access to your phone or want to have a listen to some newly-released album.
We're also in a situation where if you know someone with vaguely similar music tastes, they could clone that few TB in less than an hour but I honestly don't know how much even that goes on these days. My sense is that most people aren't interested in spending much time to catalog their media.
I have been pirating artists’ entire discographies across multiple genres, 200 CD box sets, etc. for 20 years now, but I still have barely scratched 1TB -- and that’s even with my collection consisting entirely of FLACs, some of which are large 96/24 files or 5.1 surround-sound files. Audio alone just doesn’t take up much space. I don’t think obsessive fans are going to get into a “few TB” unless they are collecting for the sake of collecting, not just building their own personal collection to listen to. And a 1TB collection actually does fit now on your phone thanks to Sandisk offering a 1TB SD card.
For films, sure, one is definitely looking at more than “a few TB”. I have a collection of about 600 films, all of which are DVD images or Blu-ray remuxes, and that already amounts to 6TB. With the availability of 4K remuxes that can be up to 100GB each, demands on storage will only grow.
As the other poster mentioned, the music piracy scene today is a shadow of its old self. There has never again been a private tracker as vast and ambitious as what.cd. Seed numbers are down on lots of remaining trackers. I logged into Soulseek recently (which used to be the obsessive music anorak’s filesharing network) and I can’t find all kinds of things that were widely shared a decade ago.
A lot of this is due to the rise of Spotify as a more convenient means of listening. It is also due to so many young people today using their phone as their sole device, which is not very suitable for torrenting and other types of filesharing.
People want shit for free.
The number of people that openly state that they pirate music has contracted a little bit, but it’s nowhere near “non-existent”.
This contradicts all the research that shows that piracy went down when cheap, easy and reliable music services were available that let you access content how you want, eg. time shifted, different devices, not region restricted, etc. And piracy went up when they tried to lock that stuff down again.
Piracy will never fall to zero, but it's not worth fighting below a certain point.