Yes, riaa did research on this that showed by and large pirates spend more on media than Normie's. They promptly buried the study which was eventually leaked. Too lazy to cite myself. Ymmv
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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Piracy decreases the cost of discovery and increases the probability that those engaged in it will attend events, buy merchandise etc.
When Netflix was originally expanding out it reportedly looked at the highest active shows on piracy sites to select their material.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine pirated the Crash Team Racing remake because they loved the original as a child but they were furious about the microtransactions shoved into the remake just after launch. They wanted a couch co op game to play with their roommate and that was already loaded up in their emulator so that's what they played... roommate went on to buy the remake because it's one of the best kart racers on PlayStation. Piracy resulted in a sale they wouldn't have otherwise made.
Tbh I buy that. If you're capable of finding stuff you like to engage with, you're more likely to buy other products related to the things you engage with.
So many artists have encouraged piracy of their own work. The only ones really trying to kill piracy are the assholes that don't make the art, they simply are in control of its sales. Publishers and recording labels and such.
Current system is bad. Capitalism sends profits to people who don't work. Piracy sidesteps a lot of that, and some people send the money saved to people who do work.
It's good for the artists, popularity is decided by the masses instead of a channel. But it's bad for share holder value.
Fuck the shareholders
I agree. And we should do that publically. As a sign of solidarity with the artists.
The EU did a massive study on this:
Thanks for the link! For those that didn't want to look at a 100+ page study, a few takeaways:
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this is from 2014
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they looked at this from a few angles: film/TV, games, books, and music.
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they had conclusions for each media type. For example, from the Conclusions section: "The low willingness to pay any price suggests that if the film or TV-series were no longer illegally available, they would not have downloaded the film or TV-series from a pay site."
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Music at €0.90 wasn't too expensive for folks (so they wouldn't pirate a ton)
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Confirmed Gabe's sentiment that "Piracy is a service problem" with books. If books went out of print, they found that Piracy should go up.
You shouldn't care at all about the media industry as an industry. You shouldn't care about the owners of Disney or Larry Ellison. So feel free to pirate everything and especially stuff from those artists who are already billionaires. It's not like Taylor Swift needs more money or that John Lennon will be able to create new songs because you pay him
About the only instance of massive piracy I've seen that was significantly driven by cost factor was, rather ironically, the Nintendo DS flashcart era.
And even then, you can easily make the argument that the reason it was so popular was because of the ability to store games digitally on a single card, which was superior service than buying each game separately.
Had Nintendo adopted digital game releases as standard, piracy likely would have fallen quite a bit.
Never seen anything else come even close, everything else was always because it was a higher quality service or product from the pirate.
I think it can, yes.
Back in high school I only had enough allowance money to maybe buy 1 or 2 CDs per month (given that I don't spend that money for its primary purpose). There was no music streaming yet. During that time I've discovered countless bands through other sources and many of those bands I've followed since, been to concerts, bought merch and CDs later in time. So yes, if it wasn't for those other sources, I would've probably never discovered all that music.