Re: I think they understand
READ this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-readers-pirate-books
Here is a snippet: "Bestselling Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho is joining in with a new promotion on the notorious file-sharing site the Pirate Bay, and calling on "pirates of the world" to "unite and pirate everything I've ever written".
Coelho has long been a supporter of illegal downloads of his writing, ever since a pirated Russian edition of The Alchemist was posted online in 1999 and, far from damaging sales in the country, sent them soaring to a million copies by 2002 and more than 12m today."
Musicians and other writers are seeing things similarly: give songs/ebooks away free and build up a large market for much higher profit-margin items like paperbacks, T-shirts and concert tickets. Many software vendors give their products away free then charge for maintenance and improvement. The more freely available a product is the more people will use it and the more people will pay for it to be maintained or improved.
If a Ferrari becomes effectively free then a lot of people will download Ferraris and thus create a large market that the experts (the makers) can mine for maintenance, customisation and so on. If a product costs nothing to make and distribute then it effectively ceases to be a product and becomes an advert - effortless free publicity.
For intelligent digital entrepreneurs, making money out of this model is a no-brainer. For those mired in materialistic nineteenth century marketing concepts, it is a death-knell. For those criminal parasites who have always lined their pockets by ruthlessly preying on an artist's inability to market and distribute, it is the end of the road.