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'Pirates' Tend To Be the Biggest Buyers of Legal Content, Study Shows (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: According to a paywalled survey of 1,000 UK residents by anti-piracy outfit MUSO first spotted by Torrent Freak, 60 percent of those surveyed admitted that they had illegally streamed or downloaded music, film, or TV shows sometime in the past. But the study also showed that 83 percent of those questioned try to find the content they are looking for through above board services before trying anything else. And while the study found that 86 percent of survey takers subscribe to a streaming subscription service like Netflix, that total jumped to 91 percent among those that admit to piracy. The survey found that the top reason that users pirate is the content they were looking for wasn't legally available (34 percent) was too cumbersome or difficult to access (34 percent), or wasn't affordable (35 percent). "The entertainment industry tends to envisage piracy audiences as a criminal element, and writes them off as money lost -- but they are wrong to do so," MUSO executive Paul Briley said of the study's findings. "The reality is that the majority of people who have gone through the effort of finding and accessing such unlicensed content are, first and foremost, fans -- fans who are more often than not trying to get content legally if they can," Briley added.
But isn't. The material I pirate are material that would be really, really hard to come by (rarer music and movies). I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, in addition to having additional accounts here and there. At some point my CD collection was over 600 and my DVD collection over 800.
Another issue is also that I feel like I paid my dues. Between cassettes, CDs, DVDs, bullshit cable TV subscription for 30 years, I feel like I'm done contributing for the most part. I don't watch recent movies, and if I do, I pay for them. I definitely don't listen to today's crap music. So when I'm looking for a song from the 40's, I hit YouTube and rip the music out. Even 80's would be the same.
At the end of the day, it's the studios that fucked themselves up the ass by gouging their user base. Had they not been so greedy and made music affordable and available, they wouldn't have half the problems they're having right now.
I used to (5-10 years ago) buy a lot of DVDa and Blu-Rays.
But I almost always bought them used. So no income for any movie/content companies. Oh well.
Funny thing, I don't pirate much content but what I do pirate I don't pirate because I'm a penny pinching bargain hunter. My pirating is mostly because of dumbass artificial trade barriers that result in stuff being 'unfortunately not available in my region' or because whatever I want to watch is on some TV channel that I can only get access to by subscribing to an overpriced channel package of whom all but one or two out of a hundred channels are full of garbage that does not interest me. If I could obtain the shows, movies, documentaries, standup, music, etc... via on-demand streaming services at an affordable price and I'd probably never pirate anything at all. Fortunately at least some of the streaming services seem to be figuring this out.
Guarantee you that The Expanse was saved by pirates downloading the show. If it wasn't for the response of the pirate community on forums and chats to go buy the show on Amazon, it would have been cancelled.
It just amazes me how little these idiots underestimate this medium and the pirate community. How completely under utilized it is for many shows to gauge if a show is popular or not. You can actually tell if a tv show is absolutely shit by looking how many seeders it has on torrent sites.
People pirate because they want to see if it's worth watching.