Is pirating music still a problem? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Saul Tobin, composer, writer, on Quora:
We are way past the problem stage. “Problem” implies that something went awry from the way it was supposed to go, and needs to be fixed to set it back on the proper course. But we're no longer living in the era of illegally downloading albums into a personal collection and loading it on an iPod. We live instead in the era of Spotify, where we each pay a fraction of the cost of a single CD each month — i.e. essentially zero — to gain access to an unlimited amount and variety of music from nearly every recording artist. Spotify is not the cure for Napster, it is Napster, but armed with the legal and technological firepower Napster itself lacked.
Spotify's pricing reflects a fundamental market reality, namely that The Price of Art is Zero (as I elaborate in that essay). No amount of moralizing over the plight of artists can unopen that Pandora's Box. Illegal file sharing is not a problem with a solution, it’s merely the key that unlocked the underlying market equilibrium. The lesson is not to prop up the music industry with digital protectionism in the form of restrictive DRM or regressive laws. Fighting against economic reality is virtually guaranteed to make things worse, not better.
The real lesson is that the arts are not commodities, and their value to society cannot be supported by the free market. Like mass education, public health and safety, and basic science research, the arts can only thrive on generous public support, whether from aristocratic patrons or the state itself.
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