Monetizing Entertainment

The Perfect Storm

1

I am a member of the pirate generation. When I arrived at college in 1997, I had never heard of an MP3. By the end of my first term I had filled my 2-gigabyte hard drive with hundreds of bootlegged songs. By graduation, I had six 20 gigabyte drives of music, nearly 15,000 albums’ worth … I pirated on an industrial scale, but told no one … The files were procured in chat channels, and through Napster and BitTorrent; I haven’t purchased an album with my own money since the turn of the millennium.¹

—Stephen Witt

In the United States only, which is about one-third of the world’s entertainment product market, record companies lose almost $3 billion per year from illegal downloads. The film industry loses almost $6 billion ...