With Most Music Being Offered For Free, Why Is Piracy Still Growing?

[grimm]

As streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, YouTube and a dozen others have grown, many in the music industry assumed that the dark days of people stealing songs and albums had come to an end. With many licensed services offering almost anything the world could want to hear either for free or for a very modest monthly price, why would anybody bother stealing any longer?

While the industry is on the upswing once again, piracy hasn’t stopped, and in fact, new technologies have helped it spread to new populations and have made it easier than ever before in some regards. But, if music is so readily available to anybody with internet access, and at such a low cost, why does anybody even go out of their way to break the law and illegally access their favorite tunes?

People Don’t Want To Pay

This is perhaps the most obvious reason why anybody steals anything. If people can get something for free, especially online and when it comes to the entertainment world (so it seems), they will find a way to steal it. That has always been the case with music, though times have changed, and money is typically no longer an issue when it comes to listening to a favorite tune.

While the urge to do whatever it takes to get something for free is understandable for many consumers, it seems odd that many listeners have opted to go to such lengths to download tunes as opposed to simply accessing them on any one of the platforms where they're offered anytime, day or night, for completely no cost. Many of the largest streaming platforms are as popular as they are because they offer free music, though they typically make fans listen to ads in exchange for unpaid subscriptions.

Who Doesn’t Hate Ads?

The number of people willing to pay the industry-standard $9.99 per month for their listening pleasure is going up all the time, but there are still tens, if not hundreds of millions of people who don’t want to hand over a dime of their own money to any streaming service Thankfully, those listeners can still be monetized with ads, and there are millions who don’t mind the occasional ad being inserted in between hits, which allows them to hit play for free.

Overhearing advertisements in exchange for access to pretty much all of recorded music seems like a fair trade, but there are still many people around the world who don’t want to be bothered. Ads, especially audio-only ones, can be incredibly obnoxious, and it’s not difficult to understand how one might at least contemplate going to great lengths to cut them out of their lives, even if that meant stealing.