Music piracy is down but still very much in play

Let's face it, they don't want your type. Ownership is dying. It is much more profitable to renegotiate with the consumers that fear losing "their" music collection the price of a subscription service every once in a while.

It is remarkably difficult to just trade money in exchange for goods and services online. Between fraud, transaction costs, anti-"money laundering" requirements and general complexity the systems that actually exist are just not very good. If you fall outside the realm of a simple money-in-exchange-for-stuff paradigm, you are screwed.

Actual online retailers interfacing with customers need to make this mess as invisible as possible, but they are working with crappy inputs.

I increasingly suspect that the banking industry is the biggest economic bottleneck in advanced economies.

As the article mentions, there's a broadly accepted argument that fans have been ripped off for years before the internet came along. It's not about "Napster" coming along, it's about the internet arriving and giving us new ways to get media. CD-era comes to an end regardless of legal status of any particular online resource.

As more artists chose to upload their own music, the big-wig artists looked on, dwindling sales infringed upon by... what's this, indie bands previously only seen at local pubs? The horror!

Access > Granted is defined as "piracy" too often, but I'm not saying piracy isn't a thing, it's just not the whole picture.

I can't believe I'm paying for Netflix, but then again, no ads, HD quality. As for music.... hmmm. TO be honest I'd appreciate Netflix getting into music and offering me a good deal on their add-on music service. I'd prefer not to pay another whole $10-ish per month for music. I want package deals because my wallet wants that.

Well, she is still making her music available online against a fair price. If you mean restriction in the sense of any restriction, then, yes, it's restricted. But so is Spotify, because for every service there is another one you don't publish on.

Miss Swift was not happy with Spotify's negotiating terms. Her not playing ball with Spotify should not automatically be considered "restricting her fans from listening to her music legally," even though that's a side-effect.

I'm not privy to the details of the negotiation, I don't know who's being unreasonable, if anyone. But just saying that she restricts her fans from listening to it, that implies it's her own fault and that people are in the right for just pirating it then.

Not really.

FTA: But the music industry is still trying to recover from piracy's heyday. Last year, total music industry revenue was about $15 billion worldwide, well below the 1999 peak of $38 billion.

Ouch - think about that, seeing >60% of your industry revenue go up in smoke. And please don't give me the old line about labels ripping off artists - big labels did, somewhat, but they weren't nearly as bad as Courtney Love made out, and meantime tons of small labels went to the wall because they didn't have the revenue cushion that the big ones did. I was a DJ back in the 90s (and I was probably spending a couple of thousand $ a year on music at the time) and it was a much more economically diverse industry pre-Napster. I can't say I regard the commodification of music as an improvement, really.