Jason Derulo coming to your house to thank you personally Magnus
September 11, 2015 6:26 AM   Subscribe

 
A slight correction to the second article: no piracy sites are blocked by the country's internet service providers.

As of today, some of the largest ISPs in the country has started to cut off access to The Pirate Bay after a suit by rightsholders ended with the court ordering the named ISPs to cut off access to a list of Pirate Bay domains. This has stirred up a bit of political controversy, as it's the first case of its kind that the prosecution has won over here.
posted by Harald74 at 6:45 AM on September 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


I had been very happily not pirating anything* the last several years, and then this happened. For now I'm just listening to the MP3s I already have (and my records, which; say what you will about vinyl, but it never listens back) and trying to decide what I want to do re. any sort of streaming service.

* except for a copy of Def Leppard's Hysteria for my wife...we tried our best to spend money for it, but I guess it's tied up in some sort of rights dispute.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:47 AM on September 11, 2015


"We are now offering services that are both better and more user-friendly than illegal platforms," Thorge said.

So why'd that take 20 years, eh?
posted by chavenet at 6:47 AM on September 11, 2015 [10 favorites]


That's what happens in a death metal-based economy.
posted by jonp72 at 6:51 AM on September 11, 2015 [12 favorites]


MetaFilter: Now offering services that are both better and more user-friendly than illegal platforms.
posted by matrixclown at 6:54 AM on September 11, 2015 [4 favorites]


Piracy is such a non-issue in Norway that police barely have to do anything about it.

Um, the police don't need to get involved with piracy unless it's on the high seas.
posted by The Hamms Bear at 7:24 AM on September 11, 2015 [2 favorites]


Territorial waters, too.
posted by Dysk at 7:32 AM on September 11, 2015


Meanwhile, I have some MP3s that are old enough to vote.
posted by Mezentian at 7:50 AM on September 11, 2015 [10 favorites]


By the hammer of Tor!!
posted by argonauta at 8:17 AM on September 11, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm guessing that those figures reflect pre-tax revenues which include Norway's 25% VAT.
posted by three blind mice at 8:24 AM on September 11, 2015


By Grabthar's hammer!
posted by Mezentian at 8:24 AM on September 11, 2015


"We are now offering services that are both better and more user-friendly than illegal platforms," Thorge said.

Too bad the quality of the Spotify client has sharply declined - it's now a monstrosity that is even slower to use than iTunes.
posted by ymgve at 8:32 AM on September 11, 2015


Most valuable indeed.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:40 AM on September 11, 2015


This tracks somewhat with my experience, that (especially when it first launched) Spotify largely replaced pirating for me, and now YouTube has largely replaced Spotify after they've cut catalogs and fucked around with the interface.

I still buy music, mostly through Bandcamp but also through iTunes and in person at shows, but a lot of what I pirated was one of three categories: Out of print works unlikely to ever be reissued, which I still don't feel bad about grabbing since the most "legal" option is, like, Italian "import" reissues which are essentially bootlegs; music that I could buy but wasn't sure I wanted to — not streaming the new Django Django album before I plunked cash for it led me to the first music buyer's remorse in over a decade; promos to review, which is less important for me as I don't really write about music anymore professionally and because most of the music I'm really excited about ends up on Bandcamp the same day it would be sent in presskits anyway (I remember not too long ago getting "promos" that either required listening in person at the label's building, or were streamed through presskits with hard limits on the number of times you could listen to it — anything worth reviewing requires listening to it more than once).

Unfortunately, with the weird platform wars now, streaming like Tidal and Beats seem predicated on the idea that you have more money than sense, and ignore the central benefit that iTunes and early Spotify had: They both had a big enough catalog that you could hear pretty much whatever you wanted to on them. Splitting that up greatly diminishes the value for me.

But hey, most of the best albums I heard last year were on Bandcamp anyway, where I'm generally happy to give $10 to an artist for a good album.
posted by klangklangston at 12:24 PM on September 11, 2015


Piracy is a bulwark of democracy. Unless all of us have access to our common culture, control of that culture will be entirely (instead of just mostly) seized by the rich.

Although public libraries played this role in the 20th century, and remain significant, access to libraries is often geographically limited, and is in any case inadequate in our current media environment. As such, supporting the institution of piracy is actually more important than supporting any particular media company or individual media producer.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:26 PM on September 11, 2015 [2 favorites]


Norway is by several measures a much wealthier country than the USA, e.g. by GDP per capita. Using the data on the MusicBusiness Worldwide site, a quick computation shows that Norway's spending on recorded music represents 0.024% of the GDP. For the US, that number is about 0.028%. So on the face of it, Norway's higher spendings on music per capita can mostly be explained by higher standards of living, thus higher prices. (For instance, movie tickets are about 34% more expensive in Norway than the US according to this web site.) The real question is why the Swiss people spend so little on music.
posted by tecg at 2:45 PM on September 11, 2015 [3 favorites]


Streaming is far from exclusive to Norway--can anyone shed light onto what is different in Norway to the rest of the world? Why did piracy decline in Norway so drastically but not other places?

tecg explains spending on music very clearly as a function of living standards (thanks, tecg); my question is about piracy declining.
posted by surenoproblem at 9:45 PM on September 11, 2015


I'd wager a significant part of the shift is that Sweden was both home to PirateBay and Spotify.
posted by klangklangston at 12:14 AM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


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