Quote:
Originally Posted by
lwright84 /forum/post/0
You should really give
a watch. It's featured in full on Vimeo for free, I really think you'd like it actually.
...
You can retract this one if you want, I'll leave it alone either way though.
Not quite, you might be more accurate in saying "how the music industry works", but the "music world" has indeed changed, and dramatically so.
Haha, truly delusional you are. I posted links to a variety of websites with a variety of viewpoints and affiliations... just none of them are your beloved MPAA or RIAA.
Everyone who thinks like you that is, which thankfully are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Because most other people understand a few things:
A) People who pirate everything with no intention of ever being a legitimate consumer are indeed thieves and should be treated as such. I have tried to make the distinction before, but you insist on lumping everyone who pirates in together as entitled thieves. Obviously, that is foolish nonsense.
B) These people's actions are the minority and do not harm sales any more than the accepted losses of retail stores hurt sales. You could argue that because piracy makes it easier to "steal" in this manner then more sales are being lost, but that is a fallacious argument. For one, there is no reason to believe that these people would be purchasing their pirated content if piracy was harder to do. For two, the product is still widely available for purchase to everyone else (unlike if it was physically stolen from a retail store).
C) The majority of people who pirate do so as a "try before you buy" service, and end up legitimately purchasing the media they want to own. This is where I would agree that the rental industry has suffered at the hands of piracy, but then again streaming and subscriptions services have had a hand in it's demise as well. In reality, it's just another relic of a pre-digital era.
D) Just because someone downloads something, does not mean that person would've ever purchased it. This is something you have a hard time grasping, and I can understand why to an extent because on the surface it seems that 1+1=2. If a person took the time to download something, then obviously they did so because they had a significant interest in it, right? Clearly that is a lost sale due to piracy, ya? The reality is content is downloaded and consumed in mass proportions irrespective of the downloader's regular purchasing preferences. To put it in terms you may be able to comprehend, I've listened to thousands of songs on Youtube/Soundcloud that I would never, ever purchase. Ever. Should each of those artists also make the asinine claim that they lost my sale?
D) Piracy encourages sharing and communal discovery of new media and content more so than any other concept or distribution method in existence. Except maybe Youtube? Probably not even Youtube, actually. Either way, this point goes back to a post I made earlier which is that piracy -- at its highest level -- is about sharing and discovery, not theft. Going to back to my example at the end of C) above, I -- along with millions of others -- have also discovered things solely because of Youtube that I have ended up purchasing. Those sales would never have been possible in the pre-digital and information sharing era.
E) Many losses attributed to piracy have nothing to do with piracy. Whether it is the inevitable decrease in physical media sales that would've taken place whether piracy had ever existed or not, the rise of alternative delivery methods as a result of the evolving market, or the obvious and evidenced fact that the media industry dragged its heels in the mud and tried to cling to its outdated business model (again) rather than adopting new technology and keeping up with the shift in global consumerism... there are many, many reasons why overall sales are down compared to the mid-to-late 90s. You can cry and point your finger exclusively at piracy all you want, clearly, but it doesn't change reality.
There are more points I could make, but I can't believe I let myself get dragged back into this already. It is a useless endeavor, as you will no doubt re-contextualize and misinterpret my words into another mind-numbing retort that will force me to respond in turn (I can't wait to see how you butcher A-E above, should be highly entertaining). Suffice to say, it's not some "twisted belief system" that is indicating that piracy does indeed help sales. It is simply the reality outside of the MPAA\\RIAA-endorsed bubble you insist on dwelling in. Do the people in my point A above help sales? No, of course not, as I explained. But I've never made that argument, you have just been arguing with me like I have. You like to claim I live in my own bubble of self-justification and warped rationale that enables me to believe what I do, and that is cute and all, but that is exactly what I'd expect someone so misinformed, closed-minded, and out-of-touch with the evolved world around him to say.