> I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often

Woah, woah, let's back up here. You made a metaphor about orders of magnitude. I asserted that orders of magnitude on the level of the global environment and the individual human are very different and provided you with a metaphor to illustrate that. I made no suggestion that piracy was theft so you had no need to correct me on this "basic fact."

> Everyone used to make more money

It's not clear what you're saying with this. Maybe we should just continue the trend and say no one should earn any money anymore? Honestly confused by this one.

> this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior

How did we come to the current model? Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?"

Come on, I'm happy to criticise companies like Spotify all day but they weren't the driving force in creating the current model and having some of the richest people in our society sit around in forums like this saying maybe musicians shouldn't be paid at all really isn't helping

> Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?"

Basically yes. Except for the "happily" bit before. Even the biggest artists were always getting shafted by the labels, is it surprising that the labels would fuck their artists over even more given the chance? Taylor Swift's fight with the label may legendary but there's thousands of working musicians out there scraping by getting credits on movies and bigger band releases (jazz and whatnot) and they remain as poor as they ever have, from vinyl through to streaming. So I just don't think it's ever been something that random consumers really influence, it's always been the labels fucking over the artists, and that's where my scale argument comes from.

Me downloading a song has nothing to do with record labels spending the last six decades writing progressively more predatory contracts, fighting every new technology until they can find a way to capture value from it at the expense of their artists, and working with streaming companies to extract every slice of margin they can until the artist gets their $.20 paycheck on ten thousand listens.

This argument I don't like: a company found a way to exploit someone so as to sell people something cheaper and then people bought the cheaper thing. It's thus the consumer's fault that the other people got exploited. I see it all the time and that falls under the same umbrella of what I'm arguing against, the idea that corporations are immune to criticism because they're just profit generating algorithms and actually it's on us to make the world better by not buying what they're selling. Why not just cut out the middle man literally and stop the exploitative behavior?

So far as I know nobody here is arguing musicians shouldn't get paid. I'm arguing the opposite.