Piracy in perspective.

While I'm sure most people are accustomed to pirates trying to defend their stance, I'd just like to throw out another little defense out there. Am I some sort of legalize piracy type? no, do I think it's justifiable? not really, but what I would like to try to do is try to clean up the images of pirates a little bit, they aren't as bad as the media makes them out to be.

For years people moaned how they liked a couple of songs on a CD, but the rest of the CD was bad and they could not justify the exuberant prices charged just to have the couple of songs they liked. Of course not all albums were like this, and if you look to the highest selling CD's, you'll generally find that they are albums that are good throughout. Oh to be able to have just those couple of songs, and perhaps put them into your own compilations, so you were only ever listening to what you thought was good. A long came file sharing, making this possible, giving you only what you wanted and best of all it was effectively free. File sharing grew and grew and grew, the record companies sat back, continuing to push their CD's at expensive prices while people started growing accustomed to free music of their choice. Buy a $30 CD to get the couple of songs you want, or just download those two songs for free? pretty easy choice. For how long music listeners had pretty clearly started to say that this was the future, digital distribution, but the record companies didn't want to budge. It took so long for the record companies to get their ass into gear and start providing this service that clearly thousands and thousands of people wanted to use that it's a miracle that anyone went to use itunes and the like once it came out, after all we had been getting this for free for years. Despite this, if we look at the figures herehttp://www.ifpi.org/content/library/Jupiter_Research_study_on_online_piracy.pdf we see that pirates, compared to music buyers, are

31% more likely to buy single tracks online.

33% more likely to buy music albums online.

100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.

60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phones.

showing clearly that, although not all, many pirates simply wanted the service provided by digital distribution and file sharing rather than just skimping out on paying. Now that is available in a pay format, they will pay.