Piracy

After reading several of the articles, I think there are two interesting conversation pieces: where people get their music, and maybe more interesting, where people get their movies. So first let’s look at music. I think the article is right; most people nowadays are not pirating music nearly as much. Granted my opinion is based in only the people I am exposed to – which is generally tech savvy college kids, who when they want something for free or illegally) they can find a way to get it. Just as nearly all college students found creative ways of getting booze while they were underage, getting music has always been at the top of that priority list. When we were all younger, LimeWire and other sites were incredibly easy to use, incredibly accessible, and made it seem like it was totally legit. This is what we got used to, this was our norm. Then as we got older things started to change and thus we had to adjust our methods slightly. But as we started to have less time to scour the internet for good quality copies, places like Spotify and Apple Music have become a lot more common. I think a majority of college kids use a streaming site rather than pirating their own music now. Having the huge library of music at their fingertips rather than having to hunt and peck for a certain track, makes it a lot more appealing and a lot more usable.

But what I think is an interesting point, but I don’t have a real response to it, is what percentage are willing to pay for that convenience (Spotify Premium, Apple Music, Pandora Plus, etc.) versus people like me who are perfectly content with hearing a commercial every now and then as long as I have access to all the music on free platforms (Spotify Free, Google Play, etc.).

Moving onto movies. Nearly everyone you come in contact with “has Netflix.” But what I want to know is how many actually have Netflix. Its one thing if their parents have Netflix and them and their siblings all use it, but it’s a completely different story when their friend’s parents have Netflix and they use it even though they have almost no connection to the actual owner of the subscription. I am fairly confident that if I did not have access to Netflix as I do right now, I could send out ten texts asking for login credentials and I would receive at least five responses with their info. Netflix is the unique example of this, and I know it breaks the Terms & Conditions in Netflix’s agreement package, but how prevalent is this? And how would Netflix go about stopping it effectively?

With music there are a lot of work around to receiving content for free while maintaining legality. But when it comes to movies, there are not any streaming sites (or at least none that I know of) that gives their content for free.

And just to wrap up on a completely unrelated note, I found all of the Kanye nonsense incredibly comical. Especially since I am not a fan of him, so I love the fuel to make fun of him.