Controversial opinion: When a paid service such as a streaming subscription has a worse selection of media and more ads than a free service that is technically piracy, you are not only justified, but morally obligated to use the free version.
That forces the subscription services to either change their business model and customer service practices or lose customers permanently. Because let me tell you, once you go free, you never go back. Why would you pay nine dollars a month for a service with in-player ads if you can have a bigger selection of content and only banner ads, without paying a subscription at all?
But what about the artists? You may ask. That is a good question. Streaming services already pay the equivalent of jack and shit to the creators. So what are you going to do with that nine dollars of disposable income now that you no longer pay the salary of the Netflix board members? Commission an artist. Or just donate to an artist. You will feel better about it, and it will actually help in creating art. Now isn’t that a novel idea.
Or, alternatively, keep the nine bucks a month in your pocket. Buy rice with it. A lot of rice. And dried beans. Get ready for the food shortages that are sure to come in the following years.
You shouldn’t care at all about the media industry as an industry. You shouldn’t care about the owners of Disney or Larry Ellison. So feel free to pirate everything and especially stuff from those artists who are already billionaires. It’s not like Taylor Swift needs more money or that John Lennon will be able to create new songs because you pay him
The EU did a massive study on this:
Thanks for the link! For those that didn’t want to look at a 100+ page study, a few takeaways:
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this is from 2014
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they looked at this from a few angles: film/TV, games, books, and music.
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they had conclusions for each media type. For example, from the Conclusions section: “The low willingness to pay any price suggests that if the film or TV-series were no longer illegally available, they would not have downloaded the film or TV-series from a pay site.”
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Music at €0.90 wasn’t too expensive for folks (so they wouldn’t pirate a ton)
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Confirmed Gabe’s sentiment that “Piracy is a service problem” with books. If books went out of print, they found that Piracy should go up.
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Yes, riaa did research on this that showed by and large pirates spend more on media than Normie’s. They promptly buried the study which was eventually leaked. Too lazy to cite myself. Ymmv
Piracy decreases the cost of discovery and increases the probability that those engaged in it will attend events, buy merchandise etc.
When Netflix was originally expanding out it reportedly looked at the highest active shows on piracy sites to select their material.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine pirated the Crash Team Racing remake because they loved the original as a child but they were furious about the microtransactions shoved into the remake just after launch. They wanted a couch co op game to play with their roommate and that was already loaded up in their emulator so that’s what they played… roommate went on to buy the remake because it’s one of the best kart racers on PlayStation. Piracy resulted in a sale they wouldn’t have otherwise made.
Tbh I buy that. If you’re capable of finding stuff you like to engage with, you’re more likely to buy other products related to the things you engage with.
Current system is bad. Capitalism sends profits to people who don’t work. Piracy sidesteps a lot of that, and some people send the money saved to people who do work.
So many artists have encouraged piracy of their own work. The only ones really trying to kill piracy are the assholes that don’t make the art, they simply are in control of its sales. Publishers and recording labels and such.
About the only instance of massive piracy I’ve seen that was significantly driven by cost factor was, rather ironically, the Nintendo DS flashcart era.
And even then, you can easily make the argument that the reason it was so popular was because of the ability to store games digitally on a single card, which was superior service than buying each game separately.
Had Nintendo adopted digital game releases as standard, piracy likely would have fallen quite a bit.
Never seen anything else come even close, everything else was always because it was a higher quality service or product from the pirate.
It’s good for the artists, popularity is decided by the masses instead of a channel. But it’s bad for share holder value.
Fuck the shareholders
I agree. And we should do that publically. As a sign of solidarity with the artists.
