> The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice.
You had absolutely the choice to buy CDs and not pirate anything from the Web. And the "hole" never nearly got filled with legal online services anyway even when they existed. 1999 CD sales are still the peak of music revenue.
Piracy is a service problem. Back in the early 2000s pirates simply offered a better service.
The gaming industry understood that and quickly created online marketplaces for games.
The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier - spent the 2000s trying to sue grandmas who filmed their kids dancing to copyrighted music.
Maybe for two short years until iTunes came out. Then there was no service problem anymore. But CD sales kept collapsing while digital sales were hardly worth noting. Which proves that people loved pirated music because it was free, not because they couldn't buy it.
> created online marketplaces for games. The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier -
Spotify exists for quite a long while now and revenue still hasn't returned, despite the world economy growing substantially since then, which refutes your theory. Spotify is so cheap because of piracy.
iTunes was not available everywhere. It was officially available in Eastern Europe only around 2011/2012. And in many other countries even later. Around the same time as Spotify which was a lot better service.
Before that I could either buy ridiculously overpriced CDs or go to ThePirateBay which was available in my country from day one. So yeah - it absolutely was a service problem.
Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.
> Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.
The fact that revenue still hasn't returned to 1999 levels shows that the price is not "reasonable". They are forced to price it that low because otherwise people would just pirate the music. Many probably still do.
Alternatively, the 1999 levels weren't reasonable. Or the 1999 level isn't reasonably today because there's a LOT more entertainment alternatives vying for attention.
Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music.
Buying CDs wasn't a reasonable choice anymore in the digital age, CDs were outdated and not fit in the age where people could buy portable mp3 players.
The music industry was beyond late, they were a full decade late to the party and paid the price for it.
It was the same for movies for even a longer time until Netflix caught up, personally I couldn't buy the movies or series I wanted at the time, it wasn't available anywhere.
> Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music.
Yes I know, I specifically avoided to talk about it since it did not really meet the demand at the time. The catalog was too small and DRMs were not removable at the time (until 2009) so it was pretty much useless for an mp3 player. I still give it to iTunes, it was the only legal place to buy music for the longest time even if it was limited.
Also the Windows version and the music store only launched in 2003.
Steam DRM (video games) is also not removable. And iTunes music did work on iPods. The main issue was that most people filled their iPods with pirated music instead.
But Steam games do work straight away on your computer, iTunes DRM music did not work on your average mp3 player everybody had. It's not like you could do something about it, it just refused to play it, I know, I had one.
And if you're asking customers to pay money to get the legal music and then download a DRM removal software from some Russian website to be able to listen to it (that might existed at the time, I don't remember), well that's even more hassle than piracy.
Even Apple themselves noticed the problem but a little too late, by then Spotify was already starting to spread.
Even iPod owners filled their hard drives with pirated MP3s. And every smartphone can support any DRM music software just as much as every PC can support something like Steam. The admissable reasons for piracy have long ceased to exist, yet people still don't like to pay for music. The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.
As much iPods were a commercial success, they were absolutely dwarfed more than 10 to 1 by the number of standard mp3 players and those could not read DRM music at all. Out of my whole high school, you only had maybe one or two guys with a real iPod and thousands of mp3 players. They were much cheaper to buy and even easier to use.
And not sure why you bring smartphones, by the time modern smartphones were popular in the 2010s, people were using Spotify already.
> The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.
Music piracy is at its lowest now it has ever been since the 80s.
iTunes only launched in 2011/2012 in Eastern Europe and many other countries. Before that the only way to get music digitally was to download it from P2P networks.
You had absolutely the choice to buy CDs and not pirate anything from the Web. And the "hole" never nearly got filled with legal online services anyway even when they existed. 1999 CD sales are still the peak of music revenue.