You are asking for the impossible, people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0. Fans are happy to curate the art the like and will always do a better work , and for free.
The only thing that might make sense is if they distributed an original instead of a copy, i.e. a different movie to every user, a different song etc. Copyright is just not compatible with the digital world, it worked for a while copies were physical, but now we re going back to the pre-copyright era where culture was spreading freely. We can blame piracy for that, but it's not just piracy. The Entertainment industries are largely based on building hype and celebrities, while the cost of production keeps falling thanks to digital production. There is an oversupply of creativity which obviously should drive their profits down. Even without piracy these industries would face big problems.
Then download the torrent and tip the producer somehow. Why pay for another service that is clearly not needed? I actually thought someone should have already built a startup selling 'virtual tickets'.
The most anyone has ever raised that way (following a particularly egregious leaking of a film before release in Russia, albeit probably for political reasons) is $14,000. I don't personally know anyone who's made any money from tips, and it's not exactly a promising business model.
There are actually a number of ways to monetize filmmaking without selling the copies themselves (at least not directly to consumers). There's a reason why film success is measured in "box office" earnings, for example. And then you have things like merchandising deals, licensing of content/trademarks to other content creators, etc.
Box office earnings are a barometer for home market sales...in fact I'd go so far as to say that the theatrical release is, for most films, the advertising campaign. Most films lose money at the box office but that's OK, because the purpose is to establish the perception of the film in the public's mind as A Movie, so that it can make an actual profit in the secondary market.
Merchandising and other ancillary income is nice but doesn't amount to much for non-blockbuster films. Your R-rated drama isn't going to make tons of money from novelizations, t-shirt and poster sales, even if it's a hit...maybe 2-3% of your budget. Some films have lots of marketing/product placement potential (or are put together specifically to meet that requirement) but most don't. seeing a major reliance on that in a film's business plan would be a huge red flag.
>>people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0
This is precisely why I think Apple won't last much long in the mobile/watch battle. Android is like the Windows of the 90's and early 2000's. Available for free, with hardware largely being a commodity, and all Google caring about the traffic and market penetration. Apple will have to growingly fight to push their products into the market which is flooded with cheap android devices offering the same features/capabilities.
In fact this is already happening in India and China.
Windows wasn't ever free (until very recently, and even that isn't exactly the whole story). A big reason for the sheer quantity of bloatware on Windows PCs even nowadays is because that bloatware subsidizes the cost of Windows.
I know (and agree with) what you're getting at (that inexpensive commodity products dominate more easily than expensive niche products in a given industry), but comparing Windows and Android isn't exactly a perfect analogy.
Legally it wasn't free. But illegally it always was, at least it was as good as free.
In fact Microsoft itself wanted people to do it. Because if students and ordinary people pirate their OS, they will be trained to use it in everyday life. Later on, they would sell the OS to enterprises when the same people would eventually work there. That way they can always claim their OS was the most widely used OS in the industry.
Plus if they hadn't let people freely pirate their OS, Linux would have eaten their lunch big time.
Free as in legally free is what I meant; otherwise, we can argue all day that OS/2 and Solaris and OS X and IRIX were "always" free since it was (and indeed, still is) possible to pirate them.
You're also significantly overestimating the number of folks who actually installed Windows themselves, let alone who did so with a pirated version. Most Windows installations are OEM preinstallations, and Microsoft has been well aware of this (and actively encouraged this, albeit being dinged in the process for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act).
Fans are happy to curate the art the like and will always do a better work , and for free.
LOL no. Sure there is no shortage of little YouTube videos that replace some kinds of TV content but most people don't have the creative skills required for high quality narrative content. It's precisely because this is in such short supply that popular shows are pirated in such enormous quantities. If there were so much great creativity about, where are all the great indie/ micro-budget/ fan-based/ crowd-sourced films and TV dramas? There are tons of little short films and imaginative trailers to be found on the internet that were filmed for small sums over a few days, but relatively little long-form content because that involves way more time and effort.
The Entertainment industries are largely based on building hype and celebrities, while the cost of production keeps falling thanks to digital production.
That's not true. Some parts of production get cheaper because of digital methods, eg I don't need to pay the same money for film stock, chemical development etc, I can just buy a bunch of hard disks instead, which will be quite a bit cheaper. That's great - instead of spending $100/minute on celluloid every time we run the camera, we can build a set of multi-terabyte arrays and set up a modest asset-management pipeline for a few thousand $.
But that's only one part of production. People still need to eat, lights still need to be put up and equipment moved around, locations still need to be rented, costumes still need to be made, actors need to be paid and so on. You can try and do all these things for free, but if you do it will look ugly, the camera angles will be bad, the subject matter won't be interesting, the actors will looks badly dressed and the performances will be poor. Of course big Hollywood productions are all about marketing glitz and paying huge sums to very famous people (mainly because they predictably attract audiences who want to look at them). but even small-character-driven dramas require a great deal of time and effort to manufacture. It's very very difficult to make a basic 90 min. film that meets basic consumer expectations of technical quality for less than a few hundred thousand dollars. It's possible, of course, but the vast majority of films made for substantially lower budgets are of really bad quality.
There is an oversupply of creativity which obviously should drive their profits down.
But creativity is only one input to a film. You can't solve every problem by just throwing more creative people at it, not least because the more people you throw at a problem, the more they get in each others' way and the lower productivity becomes. Screenplays can often benefit from the advice of additional creative people, but they're really better for being written by committee. Likewise, a lot of what goes on in and around the film production process is just logistics and grunt work.
A few typos in there...should have said the subject matter won't look interesting, and of course screenplays are rarely better for being written by committee.
The only thing that might make sense is if they distributed an original instead of a copy, i.e. a different movie to every user, a different song etc. Copyright is just not compatible with the digital world, it worked for a while copies were physical, but now we re going back to the pre-copyright era where culture was spreading freely. We can blame piracy for that, but it's not just piracy. The Entertainment industries are largely based on building hype and celebrities, while the cost of production keeps falling thanks to digital production. There is an oversupply of creativity which obviously should drive their profits down. Even without piracy these industries would face big problems.