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by godelski 1083 days ago
We can also look at pirating as another reasoning.

Music pirating happened because it was simply impossible to get a lot of music you wanted to. Then when you could find it, you'd pay a large amount. Maybe not even knowing if you liked the work. Napster and Limewire come in because they let you get whatever and even one song at a time. Music industry comes in with DRM and makes it harder to rip CDs, but the mouse always wins. Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify killed a lot of music pirating because they offered most of the advantages that pirating had: access and portability. It made things easy.

Or look at movies. The "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad started in 2004, when a ticket cost under $10 (I think I paid around $6-$8). Now that same ticket is $18-$20, which is $11-$13 in 2004. Not to mention the crazy prices for refreshments. People didn't stop liking going to the movie theaters, they were priced out (along with the studios migrating towards international audiences and diverging from our cultural standards to theirs). Home streaming didn't fix that because they charged the same price or more for a ticket. Netflix killed a lot because people would rather wait (and especially after they started making their own content). Then more streaming services popped up and pirating is back because it re-simplified things. PopcornTime was incredibly popular for a bit and was simple enough for my grandma to use.

This is all really due to incredibly short sighted thinking. Chasing one marker to the next not realizing that they're veering away from the actual goal. I know this link isn't exactly the same thing, but we should be able to see the parallels here because it is the exact same game going on[0], just with profit maximization rather than policy making (we can formulate markets as a social choice theory problem).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw

1 comments

And now some musicians are whining and saying that we should stop using spotify, because it doesn't pay them as much as they want - that it is as bad as piracy. You can't win with those people.