When Pirates Offered Better Service

The Day Music Changed Forever

On June 1, 1999, an eighteen-year-old kid in a Northeastern University dorm room launched something that would bring the music industry to its knees. Shawn Fanning called it Napster, and within two years, 80 million people were using it to download 14,000 songs every minute.¹

The technology was simple: a central server indexed which songs each user had, then let computers talk directly to each other. No complicated setup. No technical expertise required. Just type in “Metallica” and boom—there it was.

The Recording Industry Association of America declared war. They sued. They won. By July 2001, Napster was dead. The company filed for bankruptcy in June 2002 and sold its assets for a measly $5 million.¹

Victory, right?

Not quite. Music industry revenue had peaked at $14.6 billion in 1999. By 2009, it had collapsed to $6.3 billion.¹ CD sales cratered from 942.5 million units in 2000 to 240.8 million by 2011. Between 2005 and 2009, approximately 2,680 record stores closed across America.

But here’s what nobody wants to talk about: people weren’t pirating because they were cheap. They were pirating because it was easier.

The Anti-Piracy Campaign That Became a Meme

Remember those FBI warnings at the start of every DVD? The ones you couldn’t skip, even though you’d just paid $20 for the movie?

Then came the infamous campaign. Theaters everywhere showed the same public service announcement: “YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR. YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A HANDBAG. DOWNLOADING PIRATED FILMS IS STEALING.”²

It became one of the most mocked advertisements in history. The phrase mutated into “you wouldn’t download a car” and spread across the internet as a meme symbolizing how completely tone-deaf the industry had become.

The irony? In 2025, researchers discovered the campaign itself used a pirated font—a cracked version they never licensed properly.² You literally cannot make this up.

But the real disaster was Digital Rights Management. Sony BMG secretly installed rootkit malware on CDs. The software hid on users’ computers, created security vulnerabilities, consumed system resources, and transmitted listening habits back to Sony—all without clear disclosure.³

When questioned, Sony BMG President Thomas Hesse responded: “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”³

An estimated 550,000+ networks got infected, including thousands of military and defense systems. The settlement required Sony to reimburse consumers up to $150 for damages and recall unsold CDs. Sony suspended all CD copy-protection efforts entirely.³

DVD encryption? CBlu-ray’s “unbreakable” AACS encryption? Broken within months of release. Apple’s FairPlay DRM on iTunes? Steve Jobs himself wrote an open letter calling DRM futile, arguing that “hackers will always find methods to break DRM” while “DRM restrictions only hurt legal users.”

Every technical solution punished paying customers while barely slowing down pirates.

The Service That Actually Worked

2007, Netflix launched something called “Watch Instantly”. It was primitive. It required Internet Explorer with a special plugin. But it represented something revolutionary: legal content that was actually convenient to access.

The impact was measurable and dramatic. BitTorrent traffic plummeted ⁴ Netflix traffic skyrocketed.

Academic research confirmed it. A major film to Netflix led to an 11% drop in daily piracy downloads. A study examining Netflix’s failure to launch in Indonesia showed it caused a 19.7% increase in searches for pirated content.⁴

This validated what Valve founder Gabe Newell had articulated: “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24×7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”⁵

For a brief, shining moment between 2007 and 2015, the entertainment industry had figured it out. Make legal access convenient enough, and piracy becomes irrelevant.

It was solved, it was amazing. Well, then everyone got greedy.

The Fragmentation That Brought Piracy Back

Rather than learning from Netflix’s success, every major studio decided to launch their own streaming service. Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+ the list kept growing.

Content got pulled everywhere. WarnerMedia moved “Friends” from Netflix to HBO Max. NBC Universal paid for exclusive rights to “The Office” on Peacock—even though “The Office” had been Netflix’s most-watched show.

The financial burden on consumers exploded. Netflix cost about $108-120 annually. By 2025, getting comprehensive content across seven major platforms runs $803 to $1,451 per year, for the same content that used to be in one place.⁴

And content became temporary. Studios started removing shows from their own platforms for tax write-offs. Warner Bros. Discovery purged “Westworld” and dozens of other originals from HBO Max. Disney+ removed “Willow” and other series during cost-cutting. The promise of comprehensive digital libraries evaporated.

Piracy responded exactly as you’d expect. After declining throughout Netflix’s rise, BitTorrent traffic began increasing. MUSO’s 2024 Global Piracy Report documented billion’s of visits to piracy websites.⁴

The industry had recreated the exact conditions that spawned Napster: content scattered across multiple expensive services, confusing availability, geographic restrictions, and temporary licensing windows. Pirates once again offered superior user experience—a single interface, comprehensive catalog, no restrictions, permanent availability.

We’d come full circle.

Why Humans Always Choose Convenience

There’s actual science behind this pattern. Consumers seek the “path of least resistance” even when alternatives offer better economic outcomes.⁶

Herbert Simon’s “satisficing” theory explains it: we lack perfect information and cognitive capacity for optimal decisions, so we seek satisfactory results with minimal time and energy expenditure. Richard Thaler’s nudge theory, which earned him the Nobel Prize, demonstrates that “making the right decision the path of least resistance” can increase participation by up to 20 percent.

Research during COVID-19 found that “after more than 16 months of consumer dependence on connectivity and omnichannel experiences, the baseline for convenience is higher than ever.” Consumer expectations permanently shifted.

This explains why services with inferior selection but superior convenience often outcompete cheaper alternatives with more friction. It’s not that price doesn’t matter. It’s that when faced with a frustrating experience, people will pay extra or even break rules to get things done efficiently.

The Path Forward

So what do we do with this?

First, stop pretending that more restrictions solve access problems. The music industry tried that for a decade. It failed spectacularly, cost billions, and created security vulnerabilities that endangered users.

Second, acknowledge that convenience consistently trumps price in consumer decisions. Research shows 97% of people have abandoned purchases due to inconvenience despite initially prioritizing other factors.⁶ Your data users are no different. If there’s an easier way to get data, they’ll take it. If there’s an easier way to handle change management, they’ll do it. We need to simplify processes, build customer experiences around data people actually trust, and make accessing quality data the path of least resistance.

Third, recognize that when legitimate access is too restrictive, slow, or difficult, users find workarounds. 67% of Fortune 1000 employees already use unapproved tools. The average company has 975 unknown services running.⁷ That’s not a security problem you can lock down—it’s a service problem you need to solve.

The solution isn’t eliminating governance. It’s making governed data access so convenient and fast that circumventing official channels becomes less attractive than following proper procedures.

Research on data democratization shows that companies with advanced strategies report 30% higher revenue growth and 45% higher net profit margins.⁷ Organizations implementing inclusive data access see 64.3% increases in analytical contributions from previously underrepresented departments, 47.2% increases in identification of market opportunities, and 52.8% enhancement in employee engagement scores.

But democratization done wrong just creates chaos. You need the balance: strong governance with low friction. Proper data modeling that makes structure self-evident. Self-service tools that don’t require IT tickets for basic queries. Clear documentation. Fast access. Consistent definitions.

Make the right way the easy way, and people stop looking for shortcuts.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Twenty-six years after Napster launched, the entertainment industry has finally relearned what it briefly understood during Netflix’s peak: consumers choose legal services over piracy when legal options offer superior convenience, comprehensive catalogs, reasonable pricing, and respect for fair use.

The lesson is unavoidable: when you make legitimate access harder than circumvention, people circumvent. When pirates offer better user experience than you do, you lose—regardless of how right you are about intellectual property, security policies, or governance requirements.

Organizations that make legitimate access the path of least resistance will capture users. Those that maintain cumbersome authentication, fragmented catalogs, restrictive permissions, and slow approval processes will continue hemorrhaging users to circumvention.

Just like the recording industry learned the hard way: you can’t compete with piracy by being worse than pirates at serving your users’ needs.

The data is in. The pattern is clear. The choice is yours.

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