Aaron
Thursday 19th January 2012 5:57pm [Edited]
Royal Berkshire
69,949 posts
Quote: Renegade Carpark @ January 19 2012, 5:40 PM GMT
Second off, there are about a gazillion torrent sites around the globe offering up the latest films, DVDs and video games. Top notch, quality entertainment costs money to produce and if the investors don't reap the benefit, then guess what will happen?
Put it this way, remember how good British television and music were before the multi-channel, Napster days? That's right, spread the money too thinly and it's BBC 3 and Little Mix for the rest of our lives.
I agree that the distribution was too slow for the Internet age and now a generation of consumers have grown up thinking they are entitled to everything for free. So how do you combat global organised crime and an apathetic group of thieves numbering in the the millions?
Sure. Almost all fair points. But the response shouldn't be to make criminals of the people whose money you want, who you SHOULD be doing everything to get on your side, but to offer alternative and more flexible delivery methods. Every study, every statistic, every piece of remotely independent research on these issues - not to mention anecdotal evidence such as we've seen from the likes of DaButt in this and many other threads across the internet - shows that people are perfectly willing to pay for content, but not at such inflated prices and with such strings attached.
Spotify, Hulu, Lovefilm and Netflix all have pricing models that shame the idea of paying £12.99 for a 12-track CD with a 29 minute runtime, and AFAIK they're all doing well for themselves, all in profit and all paying relatively healthy royalty cheques to the relevant parties.
Studies have also shown that the more people pirate, the more money they are likely to be spending on entertainment legitimately, particularly live music and associated merchandise. Take that into account, and almost every single argument that these creative industries make, particularly the record companies, fall apart.
Movie and TV are a little different, and there are higher costs involved. But it's still no greater a challenge than re-thinking how they distribute their content, and indeed concentrate on making high quality stuff that people actually want and are happy to go and pay for. As someone (AJGO?) intimated above, the public are more than happy to pay out to support and reward people for making something that they love.
