I can remember being a kid in the 70s and 80s and we all borrowed albums from friends and made copies on cassette tapes.
Or at least all my friends did.... ;-)
I use an operating system (Ubuntu Linux) that doesn't support the main digital music download software and live in a country (Ireland) where choice is limited.
There are easily a billion people who can't legally purchase mainstream american music.
Here's a good one - listening to the radio at work in the UK is illegal unless you have a license from PRS or it's impossible for anyone else to hear the same radio (it never is).
Yes, when you listen to commercial radio where they've paid already to play the music and the radio station is selling you to their advertisers, it's still considered copyright infringement. So, listen to non-music stations? Still illegal (tortuous) as the PRS get to assume you're guilty if they can show you have a radio on at work.
They get schools too - schools here have to have a PRS music license if they want to show TV programmes in case any of the TV programmes have music in them (eg background music or interstitials, etc.). Crazy.
I rarely pirate music but, if I bought all my music on Amazon or iTunes I'd be paying thousands of dollars a year. For a large subset of the population, this is simply an unacceptable expense. Hence: piracy.
I've always gone to shows, though, to support the local artists as directly as I can.
too much??! really? $1 is hardly a lot of money for a good song.
I also forgot to mention that we now have the ability to preview almost any song before buying with services like Grooveshark.
This isn't true. When you don't attempt to prevent piracy, people think it's okay. They then feel they are entitled to getting your stuff for free...and the value will approach $0 (because nobody will be willing to pay you anything). This is already happening.
It's very similar to currency. A $100 bill is really just ink and paper. If society didn't believe it was worth this much, it wouldn't be.
The sad fact is that piracy is only getting worse. Even when you can get a song for 99 cents with no DRM or restrictions, music piracy is still rampant. I'm waiting for the next set of excuses.
In '99, it was because music was too expensive and the artists were getting screwed (which is a funny excuse, because 1% of something is something, but 1% of 0 is 0). Later, it was because DRM made it too difficult to play music. This is why you don't negociate with criminals. They will just keep bleeding you dry. The music industry is learning this lesson at the expense of their profits.
Now there is a new generation of kids that feel entitled to music, software, and movies for free.
This is one of the main reasons why I no longer sell applications. I have converted them all to services. This way, there is no way someone can pirate it.