In my humble opinion what changed since “the golden age” of p2p is mostly:

• commercial services that captured the extra value of attention and its potential impact on commercializing music, depriving the musicians and their ecosystem of those revenues.
• the successful propaganda of the obscurantists from the music industry, and the penetration in people’s minds of same crap that was heard before about the mechanical piano, the radio, the cassette tape, etc… all about to “kill musicians”.

In practice the dozen scientific (peer-to-peer-reviewed ha ha?) studies led on the topic at that all lead to the same conclusions: people who shared the most were also the ones 1/ spending the most 2/ recommending the most and also that 3/ if the sales of biggest artists may be slightly hurt by p2p, the sales of all the others (including the small ones) would actually benefit from the extra exposure/knowledge/attention/etc. Some of these studies have been collected on this wiki: https://wiki.laquadrature.net/Studies_on_file_sharing

We failed at imposing mutualized funding schemes for music (that pretty much exist for cinema in every country where a movie industry still exists), that would have enabled -based on voluntary collection of non-personal data- to fund the artists the most shared, and to fund the artists-to-go, and let companies profiteering on the back of the artists (spotify, google, etc.) capture the market.

Such public policies and the rest are pretty well detailed in the (free/libre) book by late Philippe Aigrain, that didnt age a bit: https://archive.org/details/sharing_201408

Sharing : culture and the economy in the Internet age by Aigrain, Philippe Publication date 2012 Usage Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0Creative Commons Licensebyncnd Topics Free Culture, Intellectual Property, Computer file sharing, Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.), Intellectual property, Information society Publisher Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press

Nobody should blame themselves for the ill-fated alliance of the obscurantist music industry with the predatory internet industry that fed on their fears and conservatism and their common goal of exploiting the artists while instrumentalizing them as moralistic tokens.

We should just be proud that “sharing is caring”, bittorrent like there is no tomorrow (ie. analyze the roots of the fear or guilt some feel for not doing it!), be grateful for the wide diversity of arts and culture that exists way beyond the captured, commercial mainstream, love the artists we love and never forget to pay for a concert ticket, a tshirt, a beautiful vinyl or any other stuff that is important emotionally for us when we have the means to do so… and not be guilty when we can’t, as culture is meant to be shared, and belongs to everyone! <3

Great post.

(I’m going to assume that piracy had decreased but I’m unsure if it has.)

I’m unsure if piracy is revolutionary.

In a sense, piracy rejects the commodity form by negating the exchange value that pirate listeners, etc, would otherwise pay. This rejection does not undermine the commodity form, though.

Those listeners become fans, talk about the music, etc, and create hype. In a twist of the commodity form, piracy may even increase the use value of e.g. the music because more listeners equals more popularity equals more demand. If the use value increases, so does the exchange value. (Is this right? I’m not trying to subvert use/exchange value to the ‘rules’ of supply and demand.)

And capitalists can manipulate the market because they still control production and distribution of special editions, tickets for live shows, merchandise, IP (e.g. using a band in an advert, or movie) etc. In fact, an underground cult following can be used to create a secondary market for ‘extras’ that even pirate users may pay for.

So piracy is generally insufficient to undermine the commodity form. My intuition tells me that piracy relies on and supports the commodity form, so is not revolutionary.

This reminds me of Firefly. It’s a great sci-fi series. Very popular. With watching if you haven’t already. I heard that most of its many fans pirated the show. The producers had thought the show flopped because very few people watched it through official channels. They cancelled it and there was uproar. A film was made to wrap up the series. Fuck the studio, though. I’m glad they lost millions / billions in potentially revenue. If they weren’t charging people so much to view it on whatever platform it was released on, people might have paid.

This example suggests that media based on the commodity form suffers from the contradictions of capitalism. Streaming was an attempt to resolve those contradictions, but they are coming back because streaming services have developed into monopolies. Now that the studios think they have broken the pirate model, they think they can get away with putting the prices up.

Each studio puts it’s prices up a little bit every year. But at the same time, the services are splintered. So if you had Netflix and want to watch Disney shows, you need two subscriptions. Even if the price of each one looks ‘reasonable’ (I disagree), the cost for multiple services gets very expensive very quickly. And the same handful of capitalists own all these studios even if the face of each studio is different.

This practice has arisen, again, because the studios complacently think they can control distribution. They cannot. They couldn’t permanently stop people copying tapes or CDs. They couldn’t permanently stop people copying MP3s or DVDs. And now with all the price increases, I think we’re going to see a return to mass piracy.

As you pointed out, unless you like mainstream media, streaming your favourite statist artist does not necessarily reward that artist. People will realise this before long and piracy is likely to increase again.

Even if this happens, with so much product placement, even pirating media adds something to the circulation of commodities.