People online say piracy isn't a big deal because "the artist/band makes their money from live shows and merch anyway". But that wasn't always true. Before inte

People online say piracy isn't a big deal because "the artist/band makes their money from live shows and merch anyway". But that wasn't always true. Before internet piracy, selling music actually was a viable business. Only when anything and everything became downloadable all at once did the bottom fall out of music sales as a viable way to make money. If piracy hadn't beat legitimate distribution to the punch, physical album sales would still be a niche thing but a musician could live on digital sales. This is why opposition to DRM is such a techbro take. If you care about art, like at all, you want DRM built into the fabric of the network itself so that those who hold the rights to downloaded material get paid for others' access to it. We had such an opportunity to use the internet as a distribution network such that creators could get directly paid for their work and not the middlemen. Ted Nelson, coiner of the term "hypertext", explicitly included DRM in its conceptualization. Creatives are now paying the price for lack of followthrough on Nelson's complete vision.