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Re:Record Labels Hit Internet Archive with New $400M+ Copyri... by kmeisthax on Saturday August 12, 2023 @12:22PM (#37101749)
Yes and no. Making music ubiquitous has been great for stomping out piracy but terrible for revenues. This isn't just a problem of underpricing. In the movies and TV space, all the studios found out that exclusive licensing makes more money because you can drag viewers from one subscription service to another. At the most extreme you have shit like the Disney Vault, which works because some creative work is worth more dead than alive.

If you were correct we would have stuck with everything being on Netflix and Spotify for $10/mo each because it keeps piracy rates down. In practice, while piracy rates have gone back up, they don't hurt the bottom lines of publishers as much as they've claimed[0], at least relative to how much they make from people buying multiple subscriptions. But the law allows them to continue crying crocodile tears about how much money they're losing from old sound recordings being on an archive site.

[0] In other words, one pirate copy is not one lost sale

Re:Record Labels Hit Internet Archive with New $400M+ Copyri... by naasking on Saturday August 12, 2023 @01:59PM (#37102641)
> In the movies and TV space, all the studios found out that exclusive licensing makes more money because you can drag viewers from one subscription service to another.

That's exactly the kind of shit that drives people to piracy. Then they try to recoup their falling revenue with litigation. It's stupid.

I also don't believe streaming has been that bad for revenue. The financial shenanigans they go through to avoid paying artists, writers and more are insane. It's part of the whole impetus behind the current strikes.