[bigiain]

' … it's because the point of the article was "Don't cry about piracy if you can't give me an option to buy."'

Keep in mind there's no obligation on their part to sell it to _anybody_. Taking matters into your own hands and choosing to download something you want-but-can't-buy happens to be different to physical goods, in that you're not depriving the original owner of the use of the file, but assuming you've got the "right" to have a copy is a particularly advanced sense of entitlement.

It's probably easier to have come to this realisation from Australia, quite a lot of "the internet" doesn't believe you exist if you don't have a US credit card billing address, so it's not just music and ebook downloads that I've had to make the choice of "Pirate? Use VPN & fraudulently-obtained-pre-paid-credit-card*? Bother a friend who does have US internet-commerce-existance? Or do without thing I was about to buy?".

Maybe I should pot a graph of my major label music purchases by year, and do a blog post explaining the recent steep decline?

[secretwhistle]

I don't think this is a case of entitlement. There are plenty of people who do without rather than pirate. There are plenty who pirate after trying to make a legitimate purchase. As you say, no one is under any obligation to sell their music, books, etc. to anybody. But if you're going to make it available to purchase, actually make it available to purchase.

Setting it up so that only certain people can purchase your goods does nothing for the two parties most interested in each other: the customer and the artist.

You should plot a graph of your purchases and their subsequent decline. Every decline these days is written off to piracy while situations like yours and BRAT's (and thousands of others) are ignored or dismissed as outliers.