Duck Season

Three of the main arguments of downloaders are 1) they wouldn't have bought the CD if they hadn't download it, 2) it's not really stealing since there's no physical object taken, and 3) all the money goes to the big, bad, evil record companies. All three of these arguments are fatuous.

I can conclude from personal experience alone that the first argument doesn't fly. There are a lot of CDs I wouldn't have bought if I had been able to listen to it entirely before buying, and I'm sure that every person I know have heaps of unlistened-to CDs in their collection too. Now one might be thinking, "so I'm supposed to pay for something I don't like, and that's a good thing?" But this is true of everything else one buys. I paid $8.19 for a chicken sandwich on soggy bread and a small ice tea yesterday, and I know it wasn't worth the money. The difference is, people don't start stealing sandwiches and justifying it because they don't know whether the sandwich is good before eating it.

Now one might say in response, "when I steal a chicken sandwich, the sandwich shop is missing a chicken sandwich, but when I download a CD, the record store doesn't have a CD missing." This is wrong by imagining this simple scenario: everyone is a downloader, and no one buys any CDs. In this scenario, the record store, the artist, record company, etc., make 0% of the profit they would have made if no one downloaded. Also, if no one downloaded, all the parties obviously would make 100% of the profit. But it cannot be the case that the parties would still make 100% of the profit if some people download and others don't. The relationship between number of downloaders and profits is very complex, but it probably is linear with a downward slope. In other words, the more downloaders there are, the less the profits made by the parties. Even though they may not have lost money from shrink, they still made less money than they otherwise would have.

In response to that, one might say "the money all go to the record companies, boo hoo for them if they lose money." But of course, this isn't true either. A recent study shows that for every CD sold, the record company makes a profit of 19 cents:

Professor Fisher estimates that for a typical $18 compact disc, about $7 goes to the retail store that sold you the disc; $3.75 goes back to the artists, performers, and composers; $1.50 goes into manufacturing the disc; $1.50 goes into the distribution of the disk from the manufacturer to the retailer; $1.50 pays for marketing the disc; $2.50 pays for the record company's overhead, and a whopping 19 cents is record company profit.

(draft os study in .pdf here)

The real reason for downloading is that it's free and one probably won't get caught. But of course that doesn't sound high-minded enough to be a legitimate argument.