How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1? Remember when you were forced the buy the whole album for just one song?

The biggest issue is and always will be accessibility and ease of access and these two are hindered by outdated global licensing agreements.

If you sell be a DVD with DRM that takes longer to start playing than a copy I downloaded. I will download it. If you force me to watch unskipable 10 year old ads before I can play my purchased DVD I will pirate that movie.

> How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1?

I can't think of any that stopped honestly or even owned an Apple product. Apple products are expensive.

That's not really relevant to the question asked there: You don't need to own an Apple product to buy music trough iTunes.

If you wanted just that one song then iTunes was very much the most affordable, and accessible, way to legally buy digital music back then because it only charged you $1 for a song.

The only other alternatives where, often legally rather obscure, flatrate subscription models or buying the physical full album, which would usually have cost you at least $20+

Valve did something very similar with Steam: Very easy to use and it actually passed on the savings from digital distribution to the consumers by heavily discounting the prices of games.

> That's not really relevant to the question asked there: You don't need to own an Apple product to buy music trough iTunes.

I wasn't aware that iTunes offered downloads via a website back then, because iTunes certainly does not run on the OS which the people that I'm thinking of used at the time (and still doesn't).

Yep exactly! I personally don't find Apple products useful but man I love iTunes just because I can buy DRM-free music.

I wish buying movies was this easy.

I tried iTunes on Windows once. Horrendously clunky UI, not at all what one would have expected from the vaunted "intuitive" Apple.

Nowadays at least in my country is difficult to find music legally to download and burn on a CD. My car stereo only has CD, and I don't want to change a very good stereo (it sounds far better than the built in stereo of most new cars) just to put one with bluetooth so I can play Spotify, and I don't want even to use the AUX input, since the quality is not that great (it picks up a lot of noise) and most importantly I have to use the phone to change track (and that introduces a distraction, I prefer not to use my phone when I'm driving).

Nowadays it's impossible to find mp3. I have a Spotify premium account, so I can download music, but not in a format that lets me burn it on a CD. So basically I pay 10 euro a month and I don't even have the freedom to listen to the music on whatever device I prefer.

I miss the old days where you could find everything to pirate. These days thanks god there is Telegram that lets me download some mp3 in decent quality, otherwise I have to download YouTube videos and the audio quality is awful (but probably most people will not notice since they have crappy stereos in the first place).

> Nowadays at least in my country is difficult to find music legally to download and burn on a CD.

It's weird how at the same time the lack of option to legally download and burn CD and the lack of optical players "if there is no way of legaly watching the content piracy is the only way. (and importing expensive DVDs in an erra where literally none of my devices have optical bays is not actual option)" lead to the same conclusion: pirating.

> I miss the old days where you could find everything to pirate. These days thanks god there is Telegram that lets me download some mp3 in decent quality, otherwise I have to download YouTube videos and the audio quality is awful (but probably most people will not notice since they have crappy stereos in the first place).

Amen to that. Just yesterday I bought two tracks from https://christophertin.com/projects/civilizationvi.html (it's not the link I used, that one led to gumstore something which allows me to download FLAC tracks) and today I can't even find the store link.

I tried to buy in the same way the whole album but there are no "download" options.

Every albums/EPs has different streaming options but there are no download options for everything.

I ended up using youtube-dl on the music.youtube.com and I can clearly hear the differences. I suspect these tracks are amputated from some instruments or settings.

What country is that? While the focus for sure has shifted to streaming, here in Germany e.g. Amazon will sell you files if you want.

I think the number of countries where Amazon sells MP3s is nor very high. They've never sold them in Canada for example.

Seems like there's a lot of countries where Apple doesn't even operate the iTunes Music Store too which is surprising to me. Like Albania and Iceland.

> How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1?

Apple does not allow you to "buy" music, only to rent it.

Why am I being downvoted for stating an undisputed fact? Do you feel good about yourself for promoting misinformation and downvoting factual corrections?

It's easy to use web search and see that iTunes let you buy music. The point of the statement you're reacting to stands even if buying music from iTunes isn't possible anymore.

"Back in the day" you did purchase music from Apple. This changed to a subscription now from what I understand similar to Spotify and Google.

Please provide source for your claim.

There is a wikipedia page for the iTunes Store which details the history of various ways the licensed/sold things over the years.

Yes, I have looked at the Wikipedia page for the iTunes Store. It does not claim that, at any point in time, iTunes terms would have allowed you to buy a copy of a song. They only sold you the right to listen to a song for undetermined amount of time. If you have a source that claims the contrary, please link.

So they sold you a pure audio file with no DRM, but that somehow was only intended to be a totally unenforced "right to listen to a song" they had no mechanism to terminate?

I checked and it turns out that I was wrong. You are correct that iTunes did at one point in time offer the ability to download copies of songs without DRM and without (significant) contractual limitations regarding the usage of those copies.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090106080722/http://www.apple....

> (xii) iTunes Plus Products do not contain security technology that limits your usage of such Products, and Usage Rules (iii) – (vi) do not apply to iTunes Plus Products. You may copy, store and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use.

The same limits apply to a CD or DVD purchased. You own the song.

You can still buy DRM free songs from iTunes...

There's several factors at play here. Some people view piracy as the opportunity to "try something out" before buying. This means they only buy the thing they actually liked. On the other hand, services such as Steam—which has made getting games both cheaper and easier—is probably capturing a lot of those guys who would previously do piracy, simply because it's a lot less hassle to just buy it on there. And also the price isn't horrible either, unless the game is brand new (though the matter of ownership is still an issue, though not very relevant to this discussion). Also, I know more than one person who resorted to piracy, simply because the thing wasn't available in their country yet, or because the site that sells the authorized thing either has a prohibitively expensive price, or because the service is just prohibitively bad, thus making it comparably more easy to simply pirate the thing.

>Some people view piracy as the opportunity to "try something out" before buying.

I have met precisely one person in real life who does this, and he was far enough on the Autism spectrum to receive a government-funded integration aide for the first 6 years of school.

Every other person I know pirates because it's easier than acquiring the real product, they can get a pirated version before the official version is released, or they just simply want to save money.

I personally pirate because I can't be bothered looking through 6 different streaming apps to see which one has Terminator 2 on it. Apparently I'm not alone in this regard; piracy has started to rise again since everybody pulled their content from Netflix.

Yes, it's just anecdata, but I would be shocked if more than 5% of pirates intended to purchase genuine copies of the media they actually liked.

> I would be shocked if more than 5% of pirates intended to purchase genuine copies of the media they actually liked

I agree, but I think this actually depends on the media. I do buy my technical books ($50-$150/a piece), but I want to take a look at them first before purchasing.

I pay for Letterboxd to filter my “watchlist” based on the streaming services I have (it uses the JustWatch API and supports several countries and obscure streaming services).

I personally prefer paying because I can decide what to watch on a whim, on 4k, without keeping a stash with several TB of movies I might never end up watching (like I did before Netflix) which I then have to copy or stream from another computer to my Apple TV to watch. Not even talking about the PITA of having to keep up with working tracker sites, mirrors, etc.

I understand pirating because of the price, or availability, but in terms of comfort streaming has won me over some years ago.

Just adding my own anecdote here, so that you can add one more "person I know" (even though you don't know me, you might, after this post, know of me as a person) to the list of those who have pirated specifically as a "try before you buy" method.

I have been burned too many times by games that simply do not run on my hardware despite meeting the minimum specs for the game. Modern platforms like Steam may allow for refunds, but this is a relatively new thing. Shareware and demos are a fantastic thing for someone like me, but these mostly seem to have gone away in favor of Let's Play and other videos of gameplay, which does nothing to help me determine if I can actually play the game.

Prepare to be shocked [0]

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consu...

So it is 9% and not 5%. "Justifying Infringers" as they were called in your link.

That 9% of people also included a group that believed they were justified but didn't actually buy a genuine product.

Yes. It is not truly 1:1, as in they probably don't necessarily buy everything they try for free and like, but at the same time were considered a group that spent enough money on the kinda of stuff they get for free... Thinking about the definition, I knew people like that, they were reading 10-20-40 manga per week, some just to see if they liked the content and some regularly, they mostly spent money buying Collector's edition of the stuff they loved but sometimes bought regular prints because the price was deemed good.

> I can't be bothered looking through 6 different streaming apps to see which one has Terminator 2 on it.

justwatch.com will solve that for you, and covers quite a few countries. Between Netflix, Hulu, and "Rent for $4 on Amazon" I can almost always find an option unless it's a Disney+ / Showtime / whatever exclusive.

$25-40/mo (depending on how often I have to invoke the "rent" option) seems pretty reasonable compared to cable.

I’m in Germany. I’ve got Disney+, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video.

And yet, a significant proportion of shows isn’t available for me on either of these, and requires maxdome, sky, whatever other bullshit which I’ll never subscribe to. I’m spending enough money each month on streaming that, if something isn’t on there, I’ll just pirate it.

I'm in the UK and i have a similar issue with services, like NowTV, not being available via Android TV for some reason.

At one point i dumped Amazon Fire because all the services didnt support it and only seemed to support Google. Now its switched, I'm not buying all new hardware again.

> I’m in Germany. I’ve got Disney+, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video.

Damn. Let me know if you ever host movie nights, I'll come over :3

I've also got a full Dolby Atmos setup, so I'm already the one in our friend circle responsible for movie nights c:

But often enough, I still need to rip blu rays to get proper, high quality versions of movies that otherwise aren't available at all, so movie night can end up with glitches from my custom setup

Weird smiley. What's it supposed to depict, "eyes directly above scrotum"? Or "...above buttocks"?

OMG no xD

Its like this https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sert_-_3_smile.svg

Also weird. What's the picture supposed to show; someone with two wads of chewing tobacco under their upper lip?

If anything, that picture seems to be a desperate attempt at retrofitting something, no matter what exactly, onto the smiley -- just look at the name: "3smile".

(So I think I'll stick to "ballsack with eyes".)

hehe ;) I'll make another attempt: https://www.giga.de/webapps/smileys-fuer-den-facebook-chat/t...

Aha, OK, kittycat. But also: Looks perhaps even more like a pinniped (eine Robbe). So I propose to use this as a marker for pointing out sealioning.

EDIT - Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27849412

To me it looks like either "cleft palate wide smile" or "twirly moustache grin".

They generally don't help as I'll get a referral to a service which then isn't actually available in my country, like Hulu.

Justwatch.com is pretty good at that in my experience. I'm often looking for something I can watch with a friend in Canada or Australia so I'm often using the site to check the same title in multiple countries

True story, I just recently bought a DVD box set for a old TV Show from my teen years, that was not found on any streaming service, or on any unoffical download source....

I had forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to transfer a DVD to something usable in modern times like Plex or Emby, it is something like a 8 dvd box set I think I have gotten like 2 of the DVD ripped at this point

I do this and I haven't received any aid.

>I haven't received any aid

Maybe because Greece is broke? :P

But seriously, I wasn't trying to imply that everybody who uses piracy to demo things need help - it's just extremely uncommon/unusual to buy a piece of genuine media when you already having a working pirate copy.

> Maybe because Greece is broke? :P

I cannot help but laugh at this original and non-facile joke I have definitely not heard a million times before.

> it's just extremely uncommon/unusual to buy a piece of genuine media when you already having a working pirate copy.

Probably, but in my case I don't play games often, so if I buy something I'll end up ignoring it after a few minutes 99% of the time. Pirating and buying after I finish is a good way to tell for sure if I'll like it before I buy.

>I cannot help but laugh at this original and non-facile joke I have definitely not heard a million times before.

Well, shit. There's another comment to recall at random intervals for the next 10 years and blush with embarrassment even though nobody else is around.

Hahah, I can't say that wasn't my intention :P

Convenient "return" policies also make buying easier. I have frequently bought things both on Steam and for my Kindle only to try them out. Fifteen minutes later I know whether to keep or "return" them.

I would never have made many of my purchases without that option.

When I was a teenager I pirated every single song and PC video game. And yet, I haven’t pirated one ever since I got my own bank account, Steam, and Spotify.

It’s really a convenience and accessibility issue.

I used to buy a few CDs a year, $20 for one good song?? Then Napster came along, and I found all sorts of good stuff, and I started buying a few CDs/week because I knew they had good songs on them, and were better quality audio that the stuff on Napster. I bought a few hundred CDs at full Best Buy Retail prices!, then the record companies started suing their customers, and I've never bought a new CD since.

I've given up on music in general. I'll listen to the radio in the car, but that's it. If I really want to here a song, its on Youtube somewhere.

At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income.

As an adult, I tend to pirate or buy knockoff goods precisely when it becomes more of a hassle than buying the real thing.

For example, having to go through every streaming app to work out which one has the show you want, or buying a piece of hardware sold by an American that hasn't even thought about logistics to any country that isn't the USA.

Side note: in case you didn't know, Google TV kind of solves the problem of having to go through every streaming app to find which one has the desired programme with a universal search. I just got it and find it useful.

But then multiple services, like NowTV for example, don't support Google TV but do support Amazom Fire for some reason.

Piracy for convenience happens again.

That's handy. Hopefully it stays universal - if they started charging a fee to streaming services to be included in the search we'd be back to square one.

As far as I'm aware, it's just Google Search underneath but with telly included. I doubt they'll charge for inclusion but do expect ads.

That's my experience too.

As a student, I didn't really buy the "piracy increases sales" studies, since I went from buying one thing a year to zero. Clearly, sales were lost.

As an adult, I can casually swipe my credit card and buy similar things on a whim. How much less I bought as a student is a rounding error.

Most people or organizations are either rich enough to not bother with piracy, or poor enough not to buy especially much in the first place.

I'll mention this is doubly true with industrial software. Ain't no way an individual will drop $5k on a CAD program. On the other hand, ain't no way a serious business will pirate a $5k CAD program. Having people know how to use your tools, though, drives sales.

> At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income.

Partially disagree. For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels. For example, when I want to download a music video, I can just go on youtube and I can download the video with one click (using "unofficial" software). If I wanted to use "official" channels to purchase a copy of the music video, I would have to spend a lot of time just finding out which service sells it, then figure out if they actually sell this piece of music or merely rent it out, then figure out a method to register and pay, etc. In the end I have no idea if I will even acquire a mp4 file or some kind of DRM time bomb.

I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.

Nearly everyone I know doesn't usually bother with music piracy because of Spotify and their competitors, which offer listening to nearly every song imaginable in a format that's IMO far more convenient than the MP3 days, piracy or otherwise.

I'm not talking about the convenience of "the MP3 days", I'm talking about the convenience today. The example I provided was one-click downloading a music video. You countered this with the ability to... stream audio temporarily from Spotify? Not sure how that's relevant. Does Spotify allow you to download mp4 music videos?

Your point seemed to be about "music" before veering into an example with music videos, in which I have no experience.

> For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels.

> I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.

> Your point seemed to be about "music" before veering into an example with music videos

True. Note that the text you quoted referred to "acquiring the product". Streaming audio from Spotify temporarily is different from "acquiring" the audio file. Do you think acquiring audio files via official channels is somehow less of a hassle than acquiring them via unofficial channels, like youtube-dl?

This is my experience. As a teenager I pirated about half the media I consumed. Now that I have a modest income I legally consume almost all my media (books, music and games), except for uni text books and scientific articles that aren't available through any of my libraries.

I tried following my linear algebra course using freely available materials and/or 2nd hand text books, but constant "new" editions and access to online study portals made 2nd hand books impractical.

And my experience is 100% contrary. All my schoolmates were playing pirated games (there were no others in Russia, even if it's difficult for you to imagine that). But as soon as Steam appeared, we've switched to Steam and started buying games legally. I own 292 purchased games in Steam (I've just launched Steam to check this number), around 15 in Origin, 5 in GOG and around 10 bought in Epic.

I bought a DS flashcard to play Pokémon Black with a translation patch early and then bought it day 1, don't remember using it for much more. I modded my Wii but still bought games like Skyward sword.

How old were the people back in the day? In high school I pirated a lot more because I literally had no money.

And then came Spotify and they recognized people are willing to pay.

Spotify barely pays musicians anything. It's basically legalized piracy for music.

This was even laid out explicitly in a recent leak from a former Spotify boss: https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-doesnt-need-str...

> The problem was this: piracy and music distribution. The problem was to get artists' music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.

There are people who are willing to pay for spotify. The problem with Spotify and other streaming services is that they don't offer quality ( they offer opus). Want to hear a song ? If you're lucky you get mp3 (or opus) quality. Want to stream a movie ? Depends on your ISP, weather and other factors. All streaming services offer "up to". Nothing is guaranteed. I also have " gigabit " internet. If I'm lucky i get a couple (2-3) of hundred MB/s. Usually is 7-800 kB/s.

Opus with good settings is fine. I seriously doubt you could tell the difference between lossless and Opus with a blind ABX test. Do it (you can do it at home!) and get back to me.

What's often far more noticeable is all the ways that the music is altered during production. How it's recorded, mixed and mastered. You'd be surprised what kinds of sources still get used as part of the mix today. Someone using an unshielded quarter inch cable to record a guitar amp is far more likely to contribute noise than Opus. Or a producer using Abbey Road Vinyl or iZotope. Or whoever uses some "free sample pack" that originated from an MP3 re-encoding of a poor rip of Best Service Gigapack. It's all out there.

The problem might be that you have a 7-8 mbit connection and the content providers use bandwidth scaling. I have an actual gigabit connection and Spotify is indistinguishable from uncompressed audio. Of course there's Tidal and probably some others that have lossless compression if you think you can hear the difference. Some sources claim that everyone else than Spotify pays the artists better, which might be also a reason use other services (unless you believe that the artists' work should be free).

> unless you believe that the artists' work should be free

Interesting, “work” is kind of ambiguous in that sentence. Either it means the labor or it means the artistic creation.

Anyways I want to think that there are a multitude of ways to allow global unfettered reach of the latter while ensuring the former has adequate funding.

I mean everyone is free to buy practically any pizza, in practically any form, from practically anyone, and still people get paid to come up with novel recipes.

For digital media I think YouTube and GitHub are the type of space to focus on. Compared to Spotify they are almost the kind of free services one could imagine a copyright free Netflix and Spotify could look like.

You don’t find many multi million dollar productions on the ad-financed YouTube. (You do on the completely free GitHub though). It would be interesting to find out if there are other models for YouTube-like media to get access to that kind of funds, pretty sure ads aren’t it, and copyright seems to lead to the Netflix problem.

Patreon and selling merch does it share to finance the channels I watch. But also seems limited in what can be expected.

LWN has this interesting freemium model of keeping the latest edition for subscribers only (unless they share a link), it’s kind of what Kickstarter things do too no? Some extra perks for those is provide t he funding.

Personally I would be happy to pay for “premium” YouTube subscriptions for channels doing a LWN like thing. Would probably prefer to do that through a meta-subscription service (like patreon?) built into the consumption experience to lower the barrier.

For music I see no reason these models shouldn’t be adequate. Film could be a bit mor problematic, seems like those are being replaced with series anyways though, so perhaps a good pilot is enough to secure funding for subsequent episodes.

> Interesting, “work” is kind of ambiguous in that sentence. Either it means the labor or it means the artistic creation.

It is both. Just recording music involves lots of non-creative setup and editing work, and filming typically involves a lot of logistics, set building and other non-creative labor. Equipment isn't free either even if it's not as exclusive as it used to be.

Soundcloud and Bandcamp kind of work for music, but somehow it seems that most of the artists who can get a traditional recording or distribution deal prefer going that way. I've understood that before copyright a rich patron was common way of funding art. I'm just not sure if I'd enjoy watching tech billionaires' pet projects.

That's changing. Apple Music offers Lossless and 24 bit as part of the normal subscription price now which caused Amazon Music to do the same. I personally find the quality of the AACs/MP3s fine. It's not like they are serving up 128kps files or something.

Yeah, streaming Netflix doesn't look as good as a Bluray but it looks better than a DVD or cable TV which most people are still happy with.

I do not know about apple lossless but amazon has "up to". "Up to" is not lossles. It only _could_ be. There is no indication what codec they use. So paying more for something "up to" makes no sense.

It's not more. It's the same price as a normal sub. It's "up to" because not every song is available lossless. They indicate which are.

In addition to the commenters noting that Amazon/Apple Music offer lossless, Spotify is also planning to bring out Spotify HiFi soonish. Audio quality is finally catching up…

Spotify's innovation and differentiator is that it offers music legally for free. Yes, they have a paid plan, but it's the free plan that is the bigger competition to piracy.