We're heading OT, but perhaps that I didn't make obvious that my comparison was relative is what caused your confusion.
Relative to new stuff, there is very little pirating of stuff over 20 years old (probably even over 1 year old since content is ephemeral). While I don't have the numbers to hand, I'm willing to assert that the amount of pirating of Elvis, The Beatles, etc is tiny relative to the pirating of Sky Fall, The Hobbit, Gangnam Style, Call Me Maybe, Games Of Thrones, etc.
Does "amount of pirating" refer to the number of individuals downloading? The number of torrent files? The number of kilobytes downloaded in aggregate?
Last I checked, all the copyright lobby and their lawyers are interested in measuring are the number of infractions (as a proxy for a completely fictitious number of "lost" sales).
A single Beatles anthology torrent (like this one—http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6061246/The_Beatles_-_The_Com... —with nearly 1000 currently active seeds) contains a wealth of useful material for adapters, remixers, mashup artists, and other curators/authors of potentially transformative works, an untold amount of potential inspiration for creators of all stripes, and ~400 potential infractions waiting for whoever has the misfortune of being caught accessing it.
Compare this to one infraction for downloading a copy of Skyfall.
Furthermore:
>While I don't have the numbers to hand, I'm willing to assert that the amount of pirating of Elvis, The Beatles, etc is tiny relative to the pirating of Sky Fall, The Hobbit, Gangnam Style, Call Me Maybe, Games Of Thrones, etc.
I'm willing to assert—with just as much evidence—that you don't have the aforementioned numbers "to hand" because they don't exist.
Gangnam Style is available on Youtube for free. You don't know what you are talking about. You just don't, having missed all this internet stuff.
According to Last.Fm statistics it does not seem that any musical band is listened to more than The Beatles. And virtually everything by The Beatles in the circulation is "pirated". And this stuff should be damn near public domain if you ask me.
And that's just one modern hit versus the entire catalog of one of the greatest bands ever. Sort "audio" by seeds or leeches and it's pretty much new stuff all the way down.
>having missed all this internet stuff.
I assume the ironic bit where I used this internet stuff to disprove your point is lost on you...
It is free (as in beer) so pirating it is a kind of pointless activity. Combatting this type of piracy is pointless too: try to prove that pirates stole 0$ from Psy by not watching Gangnam Style for free.
The trick is: you have to integrate the numbers over time.
Once you multiply the Beatles number by ten [years of active file sharing versus one for Gangnam Style] you'll unsurprisingly find out that Beatles are the king.
You're not the only one person confused by "pretty much new stuff" at the top. This stuff falls as readily as it climbed. That's why I quoted Last.Fm. Beatles seem to be the most popular band ever up to this day, integrally. Do you have something to say about this? Because you claimed otherwise.
Consider how long the Beatles have been that high, and how long Gangnam Style has been that high. And then of course perform the standard RIAA multiplication by number of song files in each.
I'd like to point out that the legality of sharing is not determined by the fact that it's available as a torrent or that the torrent has been posted on a specific site.
I couldn't find the details about the licensing of Gangnam Style, but your argument seems to be that it's not "free" (an almost uselessly vague term in this context) because it's on TPB.
I will say that, in the mid nineties, a lot of my friends had cassette tapes of the beatles or pink floyd. If people pirate music today the same way they copied tapes back then, I don't think your assumption is very good.
Certainly, you need actual numbers rather than handwaving arguments.
