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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

They can’t demand higher prices because their main competitor, piracy, is free.

I’ve long been opposed to piracy and thought copyright laws should be more strictly enforced, for exactly this reason. Yet most people seem to balk at that idea and think they have an absolute moral right to free content. I’m not sure why.

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Lots of people make quite good music for free, or are dead and no longer care if they get any money (even though in the latter case companies are fleecing listeners long after the artist has died)>

Piracy did well for a while in the CD era. There is no evidence that current prices represent a ceiling for what would work in 2023 before people would turn again to piracy.

I'll add to this as well, since it's a comment I see a lot.

I'm not convinced that people would be willing to go back to Piracy. I think the convenience of being able to listen to any song at any time immediately without having to connect your iPhone to your PC, drag the file over, get them recognised, maybe add some metadata. (I know there'll be more modern approaches to this. I don't think they'll be quite as easy as Spotify)

That's not even mentioning music discovery. Most of my music is now from Discover Weekly.

The power of convenience is definitely more a thing than I really appreciated in the Napster era. But I also don’t think people would generally subscribe to $50 per month streaming music.

Why wouldn't a modern Napster replacement a) run on your phone and b) have music discovery? Doing both P2P is only a legal challenge (as in, it is illegal), not a technical one.

Illegal things are harder to do on phones because the app stores act as enforcers in a way that desktop OS vendors don’t. Most people don’t sideload or jailbreak.

In what world would Apple allow a piracy app on their AppStore? This may change with the EU demanding other AppStores - but as of right now it would be unworkable.

Much cheaper content has pretty much been normalized and it’s much easier to make free copies of stuff than it used to be. And the money ends up taken from someone which, in music, mostly ends up being the artists.

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