Recently I found myself torrenting Good Omens. But then my wife reminded me that we pay for Amazon Prime. I was pirating content that I had already paid for. Why was I doing this?
I like paying for content, and I would never pirate music, so why am I still pirating video? The answer I think is in the different business models.
Streaming Music
Streaming music services do not produce music. You pay them and they give you a nice interface to access music, but they don’t produce the music themselves. Both Spotify and Apple Music have mostly the same songs, they compete on price and curation and other things, but as a consumer I can buy either service and generally access ‘music’.
When music services do try exclusivity, it often leads to piracy. As an example, when Kanye West released Life Of Pablo exclusively on Tidal, it boosted app downloads but also boosted piracy.
According to TorrentFreak, The Life of Pablo was illegally downloaded on BitTorrent and other piracy sites by some 500,000 people within a single day of its release. Those…
