"Piracy is a service problem" means that most people pirate because they don't have access (or difficult access) to the product/service they want. They would gladly pay for it, but they can't, or can't be hassled to.
I don't know if it's been backed up by real data, but services like Steam and Spotify tend to confirm this intuition.
Spotify confirms that piracy was in fact a pricing problem. With a Spotify subscription, you get way more music for a far lower price than under the previous “buy it to hear it” model a la iTunes or CDs. And artists make way less money now from recorded music than they used to.
Studios only agreed to the Spotify pricing model because the alternative was rampant file-based piracy. They figured that getting something is better than nothing.
Another thing to consider is that there is so much more music today than 20 years ago in the Napster era. There has been an explosion in content creation, as the means of production have become ever-more accessible, and it all accumulates over time, so the older stuff never goes away. The supply of music only ever increases, and naturally when the supply of something increases so dramatically, we would expect the price to go down.
What about demand? We are certainly listening to more music than ever before, and the population is growing, but not at the 10x or 100x rate that has happened to the supply of music. There’s an upper limit of 24 hours per day listening time per person. There is already more music than it is possible to listen to in a lifetime. Soon there will be more good music than it is possible to listen to in a lifetime.
I wonder if we're moving back to an older way of consuming music where many or most people have musical ability and play for themselves and family. Perhaps not quite to that degree but you're more likely to know several people who create music and share it without being or expecting to be a musician by trade.
I personally listen to less music and play more. Rather than looking for the new thing I'll examine songs in quite a lot of detail to understand them.
Sample size of one and whatnot, but I remember when I was a kid, it was pretty darn hard to find the kind of music I liked (think heavy metal that you won't hear on the radio). Sure, a CD was relatively expensive for me at the time. But mostly, it was hard to actually find.
Sure, the latest top 40 and a bit of "common niche" albums (like the usual suspects when it comes to classic music or classic rock) were easy to find. But black and death metal? Not a chance.
I wasn't even living in the middle of nowhere, mind. Just a fairly populous suburb of a major European city. But as a teenager, it was extremely unpractical to travel to the city center, and to even learn about the stores where this music would be sold.
With piracy or Spotify, that issue evaporates.
And actually, Spotify is much better. Because it's much quicker and practical to just search Spotify and click play, than it is to browse dubious trackers, not knowing if or when I might get my download. Plus, with Spotify connect, they can be sure I won't be cancelling my plan anytime soon.
For me, Spotify and similar services offer me better curated playlists. I have a lot of music on a Plex server and I still almost always use YouTube music because curation and dynamically generated, good playlist; and because the “radio to ownership” pipeline can be annoying when I’m running or whatever
Spotify absolutely fit an access problem dead on: They're subscription, unless you can tolerate ads and various limitations*. Limits like not being able to control exactly what you're listening to (no beginning to end playback of albums, only shuffle), ads every 3-5 songs, playlists that were originally capped and again, only available on shuffle.
iTunes didn't improve on the physical store model any further than "now you don't have to get out of you chair to get new music." The DRM that wrapped around most tracks was frustrating enough for most people that the cost of the album didn't matter, you were better off going to a physical store, buying the physical CD, ripping it using iTunes to unencumbered ALAC/AAC and using it with iTunes or with other devices and apps.
Sure, people still used iTunes, but more for the fact that it was HEAVILY integrated with the Hot Shit Object, the iPod.
Spotify removed the barrier at the right time to succeed in the market. If you wanted to listen to Albums, you paid. But it was there, easy, no questions. You could just pop in and listen to That Single that just came out.
Most people who wanted ad-free music are going to be willing to pay for it. The rest, who are fine with radio-ish "I want to listen to the current top40" are fine with ads. It took Apple quite a while to come to near that, and they Only have a subscription model that isn't very well liked by its users.
Not entirely - one problem I had with piracy, and I did it from the 90’s on, was finding new music. Spotify opened up catalogs with algorithms that piracy never could. Short of going to Strawberry’s and looking around… for cds to copy from friends, piracy never really had that same Spotify algo service that said “if you like this you’ll like that.”
I don't know if it's been backed up by real data, but services like Steam and Spotify tend to confirm this intuition.
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