Music Piracy study by Warner Music

[Lagmonster]

Pirates make up less than 20% of the actual market.

Leaving the piracy issue aside, this is an interesting figure. As a comparison in honesty, the Bagel Man of New York considered a company 'honest' if he got more than 80% to pay up while on the honour system. There seems to be something fairly consistent in the notion that 80 to 90 percent of people are functionally honest about common things even when they know they could get away with being dishonest. I'm sure you could influence that figure by varying attributes such as social acceptance, value gained or severity of punishment if caught, but it's fascinating to see that "only 15% of humans are truly assholes" figure keep popping up in these sorts of articles.

[Xon]

White collar is very poorly understood, both in the impact and the causes. Western society almost turns a blind eye to some truely damaging white collar crimes, or drops on a ton of bricks on those who don't game the system 'correctly' and you have to really start hunting to find any potential victims.

[Gil Hamilton]

If the artists were capable of doing it in general, don't you think more of them would do it? They'd multiply their earnings several times over!

The problem is there's a lot more to running a successful big business than just the creative parts. In fact, creativity is a pretty small part of it next to boring stuff like marketing.

There are plenty of bands that have done exactly that and it's become a more and more popular thing to do, particularly since online distribution is making it alot cheaper. The famous example I can think of was Joan Jett, when they were when she and her guys wanted to get her solo debut going, she was rejected by 23 major labels (many of which didn't want to sign her because they noticed the other labels weren't signing her... funny how that works) and eventually had to launch their own label, Blackheart Records. The single "I Love Rock n' Roll" did really well in 1982, and suddenly the labels were tripping over themselves to try to get involved (this is actually what her song "Bad Reputation" is about).

There is also another part that you are not mentioning. You say it's expensive and hard to launch you own label, which is true, but you aren't talking about the part where the major labels actively trash independent artists and work hard to make sure they don't make it big via indie labels. You seem to act in this threat like major record labels and the RIAA are just some poor businessmen getting abused by music pirates, but their behavior towards artists and what they get away with probably gives Al Capone wood from beyond the grave. Perhaps if they weren't screwing over artists and randomly suing everyone in sight for vast sums of money in the legal equivalent of a mugging, one could have sympathy for them. Hell, piracy would probably go down if they weren't thugs; people feel free to pirate music because, aside from the fact that the "theft" is almost philosophical in nature, no one feels bad about gangsters themselves being robbed.