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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 2887927" data-attributes="member: 19675">Then let me be 100% clear.I know of particular indie labels that folded because people pirated their issues rather than pay for the albums.  Because the piracy rate on their biggest releases reached 90% or more, they couldn't recoup their costs, were forced to sell off hard assets to pay creditors, and folded.  "Anecdotal?"- not to the people who lost their businesses.Some of the bands whose records were thus pirated had sunk thousands of their own dollars into the productions (sometimes via credit cards), in order to minimize recoupables and accellerate royalties.  When the recovered royalties amounted to 10% or less of their expenditures, some of those bandmembers had to sell instruments to pay off their credit card bills.The best we could do for these bands and companies was to get certain websites shut down by cutting off their ability to process credit cards (for those sites that were actually selling the pirated music and not just freely distributing it)- because the pirates were in Russia, there was no way to recover the cash.(In concrete terms, what this means to you is that the labels most likely to find new, fresh music are in the greatest danger, while the ones who have the established acts that people decry as "sucky corporate rock" will probably survive in some form or another.)Even Ani DiFranco has complained (at an industry symposium- I have no link) about how difficult it is to keep her label going for all of the piracy of her work .And really, the issue for RPGs is the same core issue for the music industry: how to make enough money to keep the doors open while fighting off predation of your profits by your own fans.The music industry IS hurting (mostly the little guys and new bands)...but the majors at least have a lot of money with which to buy time to possibly find a different business model or a medium less vulnerable to piracy.While their product isn't as vulnerable, RPG companies are operating on comparatively thin profit margins and small print runs.  Even a horrible album will generally sell more copies than a good 3rd party D20 product, and a CD or mp3 has a greater markup than any book.</blockquote>

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