Obviously there's some balance in pricing stuff. Selling all your movies for $1 a pop may kill most piracy, but it will kill your movie studio too. Selling streams for $500 per person will price most people out, regardless of whether piracy exists or not. Piracy hurts profits regardless of pricing. iTunes did not make up for the death of CDs at all. Digital sales have never even made up a third of what physical sales used to be: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Personally, I don't think consumers have a right to tell creators, "You have to sell that to me for $x or I will take it without paying." Companies certainly aren't good, but they're not typically stupid either. They're not going to price things to a point where people can't afford them. I think pirates just lie to themselves a lot to justify their actions.

> It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99). I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil.

Steve literally proceeded to launch a software app store that had DRM out of the wazoo, so even he didn't believe it.

Jobs convinced the music tracks studios to let him sell DRM free tracks on iTunes, so it seems to me like he believed it. I don't know if iTunes music is still DRM free, though.

But even it weren't, content creators unwillingness to let Apple sell DRM free media is not evidence that Jobs agrees with them.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541387/itunes-starts-... [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/1138000/drm-faq.html

Good point. Although certainly the labels insisted on this.