Media Piracy: Good Economics?

Media piracy has been going on for a long time. My friends and I used to make mix tapes between all of the music that each of us owned. In some cases if I really liked the tape I would go out and buy it outright. Same with VCR technology. My parents recorded and dubbed pretty much any movie that came out either on HBO, blockbuster, or what not. They also ended up buying many of them as well.

The problem at least in the music industry is that most CDs are crap. They cram 12 songs onto a CD and only 1 is good. They then turn around and charge you $15 or so to buy the thing. So in essence you pay $15 for one song and you will never listen to the rest. I am not saying all CDs are like this, but the vast majority of them are. Systems such as Itunes and the like have helped alleviate this to a point, but they are restrictive, and most likely to get even more so in the future.

As for the movie front, I download movies from usenet all the time, new releases and old. If I like the movie I will go ahead and buy it outright when it comes out on DVD. I just hate to waste $15 to $20 or more dollars on a movie if it is going to suck. I figure I have downloaded more than 100 movies from usenet over the last year. Out of those I have ended up purchasing more that half of them. Other movies were downloaded for curiousity sake more than anything else, IE Brokeback Mountain, bleh.

So all in all I would say it is good from the standpoint of being able to try before you buy.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

The problem is that most bands are incapable of producing more than one decent song every couple of years.

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