Maybe I’m old, but I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned Napster and music piracy as it relates to this discussion. I can’t count the number of cassettes, LPs, and CDs I bought at full retail price during the 1970s-1990s for one or two songs, only to discover that the rest of the albums were crap, or at least not to my taste. There was no way to purchase just the songs I wanted — and, from what I understood, most of the money was going to the record companies rather than the artists. So when Napster came out, I didn’t feel guilty about downloading individual songs — some of which weren’t available anywhere else, anyway. Justification? Yes — but it forced the music industry to change: Apple iTunes offered amnesty to people with previously downloaded music collections if they started subscribing. I did so from the beginning. As a music lover, I think Apple Music is one of the greatest bargains out there. I do occasionally buy CDs from indie artists I like to support them, regardless of whether their music is on Apple Music.
As for video content, my wife and I subscribe to Amazon Prime (because we buy lots of stuff from Amazon), Apple TV+ (as part of Apple Premiere), and Netflix. We also do one-month-only subscriptions to other services when we want to watch a particular series. It’s cheaper than what we used to pay for cable packages. Yes, I know taste is subjective, but I don’t understand the “there’s nothing good on Netflix” complaint. I watch video content for an hour or so every morning when I’m on my treadmill. I have more potentially interesting content in my Netflix queue than I’ll ever hope to watch. I suppose there would be a price point beyond which I wouldn’t pay for Netflix, but I can’t tell you what that is.
Is downloading pirated content stealing? Technically, yes, but it’s a gray area to me. Stealing a digital copy of something isn’t the same as stealing a physical object, because there’s no additional cost or labor involved in creating another digital copy of something. The question is, who is deprived of the income from that theft: the content creator, or the corporation that arguably gave the content creator an unfair deal? If you view the world in black-and-white terms, it doesn’t matter: you know what the rules of the system are, so you either abide by them or use legal means to change the system. What bothers me are the people on this forum who have made it clear (gleefully!) that they would pirate content no matter how inexpensive it is because, well, “corporate greed.” Individual greed and entitlement are fine, but corporate greed isn’t.
I hate the Balkanization of the streaming-content industry, where every copyright holder starts its own streaming service in the hope of recreating the success of early-days Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV. I hope they start merging with one another so that, once again, we have a small number of services from which to choose. I wish there were something like Apple Movies+, where, for maybe $50 per month, you’d have access to almost every movie and TV show ever made. But entertainment content is a luxury, not a survival need. If you believe that “everything on Netflix is garbage,” then why would you subscribe at any price? If you believe that “90% of what’s on Netflix is garbage,” then how much are you willing to pay for that considerable 10% that isn’t garbage? And if you think it’s too much, are you okay with pirating it elsewhere, versus finding alternative entertainment? Yet another First World problem…