“ I think many young people don’t pay for music, but I’m not sure that’s a generational phenomenon so much as part of being young. If you think about piracy, it tends to appeal to those with more time than money - who in the US and Europe tend to be young. Once people get older, they tend to have more money than time. If you apply enough law enforcement pressure to keep piracy inconvenient, what you’re really doing is raising its cost in terms of time. At the same time, new online music services are making legal commerce more convenient. There will always be people who pirate everything or almost everything - I’ve heard estimates of about 15 percent. They may be lost to the business. But that’s OK as long as we reduce the amount of casual piracy others engage in.
Robert Levine (author of Free Ride) as interviewed by Ben Watt here.
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