I recently checked out this article that was linked from Mastodon (my sole social media presence) and it’s a pretty quick read, if you’re interested: https://glassalmanac.com/netflix-disney-and-prime-video-are-too-expensive-and-full-of-ads-users-are-turning-back-to-illegal-methods/
Here’s my thing: For decades, I’ve been — and I’m still — not a piracy guy.
To me, someone who worked on something and would like to make money from it should be the one making that choice, and I don’t want to take that right away from them. You like getting paid for your work, right? Well so do people who wish to make art as part (or all) of their career.*
But…
The days of actually buying a piece of art like an album or movie are, while not over, now far more rare.
Streaming now is the newest, shiniest thing. With streaming services, you’re not paying a company to own something like a book or CD or movie. You’re paying to just access the music or show or movie (or book, in some cases). I suspect that’s part of the reason that people are a little more laissez-faire about piracy of that material. Probably the most common argument for pirating I’ve seen recently† goes that ‘If subscriptions to these services don’t let you own anything, then piracy of that material isn’t theft.’ (Which is a fundamentally flawed point: Ebooks and digital music and movies can of course be copied ad nauseam and don’t take away any physical product from anyone, but taking a computer file for free instead of paying for it as the owner asks is still taking money away from the people trying to earn by selling units of that work, whether that’s a software developer selling a program or a person selling an ebook.)
But also, with the abundance of streaming comes an abundance of awareness that subscribers are only getting temporary enjoyment from the service. So these days you can buy a CD or vinyl disc of a band’s album for $20 and own it forever. Or you can pay a music streaming company that same amount for exactly one month of listening to that album (and millions of others) as much as you want to… but then you don’t own anything. And further, if you don’t cough up next month’s subscription fee, your access to all of that music goes away.
Never before have we had access to so much entertainment, but only if we keep paying to have what amounts to ever-temporary access. Which can understandably feel a bit hollow and unsatisfying.
This article about an uptick in piracy came across my social media feed on the heels of my wife and me recently trying to make some cuts with monthly expenses. We now subscribe to several video streaming services, and at around $20/month each, that adds up pretty quickly.
Part of what caused the breadth our subscriptions is that those streaming/media giant services have carved up so much of the entertainment pie that there’s very little crossover from one service to the next. If you want to see one series of movies or shows, you’ll need to get one service. If you want to see a different series of movies or shows, that may only be on another service, etc. You gradually start adding more into the mix to satisfy your tastes, and if you aren’t vigilant about only watching what you want and then cancelling the service (the particularly shrewd can even get what they want watched within a free trial period and then cancel the service and not owe anything, which is better than we’ve ever done) you may find yourself years later subscribing to several of these services constantly, which becomes a significant chunk of money.
Furthering that issue is that many major media companies have their own streaming service as well — you may recall not long ago when Disney decided to remove its movies from Netflix and create its own streaming service… and voilà, just like that you’re already looking at subscribing to a whole other service to get those movies and shows as well as the ones on Netflix — and that’s only multiplied further by smaller TV channels, for instance, making their own streaming options, too.
What’s rubbed a lot of people the wrong way lately as well is that on top paying for sometimes multiple streaming services, some of those services now insert ads into their streaming. I know Prime does it, and have heard of Netflix testing it out in certain regions. Cast your mind back to the concept of streaming services in the first place and you’ll remember that they started off as an alternative to normal TV services, but where you could watch anything they offered any time and ad-free. That was precisely what you paid for: The money you pay the streaming service is so they can operate without needing to run the kinds of ads that TV channels run all the time to generate income.
Well, in case you hadn’t heard or experienced it for yourself yet, those ad-free heydays are already on the decline. There are now more streaming services with various “tiers” of service offered.
Want to access these exclusive movies and shows? Sure, that’ll be $X/mth. But that’s with commercials.
Oh, you don’t want commercials? Then that will be $Y/mth. But that’s only accessible on one household device at a time.
Oh, you may also want to view the service on multiple devices at the same time? Then that will be $Z/mth.
Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. And with each dip and double-dip into our pockets, the frustration against these companies grows.
Worse still is that demonstrably the richest people in the world are still getting more rich while the vast bulk of us get more poor — https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2024/jan/15/worlds-five-richest-men-double-their-money-as-poorest-get-poorer — so more and more people have less and less money for extras like entertainment that I’d bet is getting more sought out by those same people needing more escapist distractions from how badly they’re doing financially.
And yes, taking things you don’t need without paying for it isn’t good (let’s remember this is entertainment we’re talking about, not food; you need the latter to survive, you want the former as a distraction). But given all of the above factors, it can be very hard for a population that is increasingly poor to be sympathetic toward multi-billion-dollar companies (or trillion dollar companies, in Apple’s case) that keep raising prices of their services entirely in order to make more money than they did last year, which I touched on a couple of years ago. Vastly oversimplified, but fair: It’s a tough sell to say that a single mom barely earning enough to make rent or buy food doesn’t deserve some escapist entertainment for herself and her kid just because she can’t afford $17 (… now $18… now $19.50…) a month paid to a production company behemoth that’s making hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
I suspect a big part of the problem lies in how much these comapnies are charging for streaming. The fact of the matter, per the article I linked to at the top of this post, is that clearly people are up for paying $5-10 to get movies and TV they want. They’d rather not steal it, they will demonstrably pay a modest fee for it. Meaning, if the big streaming services were to re-jig their expectations and cut their subscription fees in half, they’d have WAY more people legally subscribing and paying them, rather than increasing numbers of the public paying someone else to illegally copy that material for them to watch.
So no, I’m still not a piracy guy. But I do understand its appeal. And as money gets more tight for more people, while production companies continue wanting to feed the increasingly hungry monster of bigger bottom lines, I understand that appeal more.
If there’s going to be any middle ground established between producer and consumer in this issue, something’s got to give. And just as a heads up to these streaming companies, that simply can’t be the people who have ever-dwindling amounts of money to live on.
*Amie McNee effectively argues in her most recent book that making art is as “real” a job as any other; that in fact it’s more important than common jobs, as artists help us shape and inform and understand insights into our societies and ourselves. How is, say, doing peoples’ tax returns more worthy of payment than someone making stories or music or visual art that entertains you or touches you emotionally? You also can’t argue that art has monetary value if there are multi-billion dollar streaming services like Spotify that are founded entirely on giving people access to that art. You’ll pay Spotify to access music but paying the musicians doesn’t make sense to you because that’s art and art isn’t work? Give your head a shake.
†Another common argument for piracy is that the source people have already made their money, so grabbing a free copy only harms the producing company, which isn’t a concern. Here’s the thing, though: Even if that were always the case — and it’s not; plenty of authors make money on each book sold and bands make money on each song or album sold, for instance, plus their future publishing negotiations are based in part on number of their units previously sold, so in taking a pirated copy of an ebook or an album, you’re screwing that writer or band twice over — it’s still not a good idea, because if the publishing or production company doesn’t make enough money on making something, they won’t keep making the very stuff you’re pirating, so no one gets paid, hurting the artists yet again.