3 ms·

That's true, but the music market is special in some ways. * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't do

That's true, but the music market is special in some ways. * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on. * Non-fungibility. Music isn't all the same. Customers want a record with their favourite artist and not just any record of similar "quality". There was a very limited time in human history where musicians could get rich by only selling recorded music. The norm otherwise has been that musicians earn money from live performances and now we're almost back to that. I'm not sure I think that's a bad thing.

cubefox 3y ago
> * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on But this scarcity is good. It enables, or would enable, production of music which wouldn't otherwise be produced. If music piracy weren't so much an issue today, the music industry size would probably be several times its current size (it would have simply grown with the rest of the economy, as it did ik the 90s) which would mean far more musicians could earn a living with their work. Especially musicians which make a type of music which isn't well suited for concerts. As a consequence, a lot of this music simply doesn't get made today. Yes, we instead got impossibly cheap Spotify (I don't think cheap flat rate streaming would have ever become a thing if it wasn't for piracy making actually selling tracks near impossible), but we also got less music, and consequently, less good music. Compare this to the video game market, where piracy isn't as big of a problem as in music, due to much larger file sizes and better copy protection. Many of the great games we have couldn't have been made if video game piracy was significantly more common.
- zirgs 3y ago
  There are more than 100M tracks on Spotify. More that one person can listen to over several lifetimes. Even if 99% of them are crap - that still leaves 1M of good tracks. The amount of available music is simply staggering nowadays.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Yeah, but it would be even better if there was no piracy and thus significantly more money to be made in the music business.
    - fluoridation 3y ago
      It's not obvious that a larger market translates to higher quality supply. Certainly greater supply, but someone who's profit-motivated and is trying to capture more of the market would probably do better producing easy and diverse content in large quantities.

cubefox 3y ago

> * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on But this scarcity is good. It enables, or would enable, production of music which wouldn't otherwise be produced. If music piracy weren't so much an issue today, the music industry size would probably be several times its current size (it would have simply grown with the rest of the economy, as it did ik the 90s) which would mean far more musicians could earn a living with their work. Especially musicians which make a type of music which isn't well suited for concerts. As a consequence, a lot of this music simply doesn't get made today. Yes, we instead got impossibly cheap Spotify (I don't think cheap flat rate streaming would have ever become a thing if it wasn't for piracy making actually selling tracks near impossible), but we also got less music, and consequently, less good music. Compare this to the video game market, where piracy isn't as big of a problem as in music, due to much larger file sizes and better copy protection. Many of the great games we have couldn't have been made if video game piracy was significantly more common.

zirgs 3y ago
There are more than 100M tracks on Spotify. More that one person can listen to over several lifetimes. Even if 99% of them are crap - that still leaves 1M of good tracks. The amount of available music is simply staggering nowadays.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Yeah, but it would be even better if there was no piracy and thus significantly more money to be made in the music business.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    It's not obvious that a larger market translates to higher quality supply. Certainly greater supply, but someone who's profit-motivated and is trying to capture more of the market would probably do better producing easy and diverse content in large quantities.