"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
Seems like advances exited long before piracy was a significant thing. Though I’m sure piracy does contribute to the imbalance like you describe.
I don’t mind paying artists for work that I like. Hell, I’ve bought much of my collection 3 times now: LP, cassette, CD. I never bought MP3s - just ripped them myself. All my CDs are in storage, which is dark, cool, and dry.
I’m pretty sure the distributors kept most of that money.
And that’s where the bulk of the problem lies: the power brokers that have always tried to control production and distribution.
And that goes back a long way. I know I’m being repetitive, but Payola has been around a long time, and rather indicative of the state of media production. It’s not like these ideas left just because someone got busted… They just learned new ways to accomplish the same goals of controlling the media marketplace without getting caught.