I worked on several commercial digital music projects in the time span between early napster and entrenched itunes. One regularly repeated meme of the era was t

I worked on several commercial digital music projects in the time span between early napster and entrenched itunes. One regularly repeated meme of the era was that people didn't want to pirate music, they just wanted it "as easy" or "no drm" or "ala carte" or "all you can eat". While statistically these were all guaranteed to be true for at least some users, in aggregate they were red herrings. The industry was in the process of significant decline due at least in part to online infringement. Over the course of several years mainstream services that more or less broke down all these barriers appeared but they failed to reverse any of the macro trends. While many of the reasons are nuanced and disputed, a number of observations are relatively uncontested. Online sales severely cannibalized physical sales but failed to significantly cut down on online infringement. ASP dropped much faster than production and distribution costs. New, powerful intermediaries formed that dictated sales practices to the labels instead of the other way around. Anecdotally, among friends and colleagues no one I knew significantly shifted their behavior. Everyone bought at least some music, and I don't think I knew anyone who refused to touch anything pirated. 12+ years on that really hasn't changed much, I still get emailed songs from rights holders or people who sell music and my friends with shared raid 5 arrays with all_the_music still buy downloads from their favorite bands. The thing that did change is the reasons for piracy. Instead of the previous concerns people were now unwilling to support the majors, or wanted higher quality encodes, or simply thought that IP sales were outdated and believed that music acts should shift to solely making their money through touring and merchandise sales. Whether these are reasonable new barriers or not I'm not at all interested in debating. I've thought many of them were compelling at various times. Rather what I think is interesting is that some number of objections always seem to exist. There was an interview with a researcher on NPR yesterday that I caught. The discussion was on cheating (on things like taxes, etc.) and how in controlled settings almost all of us are small time cheats but few of us are huge cheats. The researcher attributed a key part of this to the idea that we all want to be the good guy - and that cheating within a tolerance allowed us to continue to view ourselves that way, but cheating too much made it hard for us to view ourselves that way. While he didn't make any connection to reasons or extenuating circumstances, it seemed to jibe well with my own unscholarly impressions. That many of the reasons for intellectual property theft are constructed to allow a person to continue to see themselves as the good guy while doing something they consider immoral. "Well, I want to pay them, but [barrier X] won't let me" is almost the perfect storm of this type of mental construct - pretty much unassailable, at least until barrier X is removed.