Perhaps a more relevant analogy would a hypothetical popular newspaper example: you can buy it at the local store of some countries on the day of release, or if you live in those country where you can access them online for free or included with your TV subscription, you're fine. But if you don't live in said country and the newspaper doesn't distribute to you, or it gets to you some months late and it's old news by then, you might go looking for other access avenues. You'd very much like to get todays news so you can participate in the global discussion.
Have we not already come to the agreement that the problem is not piracy, but the lack of access in our new global arena? None of us here would be so naive as to believe that piracy will end when each of us have access regardless of our geographical location, but at least then we will be able to have a real conversation about it.
Nobody in my household has pirated even one track since the advent of Spotify in our lives. I know it's not the best sample size, and it's only anecdotal, but I suspect that would be the pattern across the board if similar models became adopted for other forms of media.
But their payout is based per stream, not per track, isn't it? At amounts that still exceed that of radio?
"For a 99c sale of a track on iTunes an indie artist gets 70c. At the time you need 140 Spotify streams to make the same 70c." (Source: http://www.spotidj.com/spotifyroyalties.htm)
These figures are hardly comparable with piracy, and for an artist with a reasonable audience, should more than exceed the $.918 average royalty for a song per unit sold that record companies provided in the era of CD sales.
The interesting thing about black/gray markets is that they crop up when demand isn't otherwise being met. So yeah, the Avengers gets pirated for one of two reasons:
1) It's not available where people want to watch it
2) It's not available for a price they want to pay
It's a fascinating problem, really. I doubt movie studios will ever be able to meet the "free" demand, but piracy in general has put all sorts of pressure on them to get movies into peoples' hands quicker. The Hunger Games was a huge hit and will be on BluRay within about 5 months of its theatrical release. It'll be out on iTunes at the same time.
Historically, this is a vast improvement. Titanic took about 10 months to go from theater to VHS. This was back in the day when places like Blockbuster had exclusive rental windows for a while too, so it was more like a year before non-pirates could purchase it for home use.
If people could reliably pirate high fidelity copies of movies between the theater and DVD releases, I suspect that timing would shrink even further.
I would posit a challenge to you: for one month don't consume any media, read any newspapers or magazines except those available to you locally. If you live in NYC, great. If you live in Santiago or Sydney, after just a few days you'll find the global discussion quite weary as you are not privy to references, certain author's critics and reviews will not be available to you, you will start avoiding most discussions that pose a risk of exposing spoilers for your favourite series.. as an native english speaker who travels and does not have access to such things in various cities I find it very difficult not to contemplate piracy just to remain up-to-date with the few media items I care about.
An example: the Daily Show is available on the Comedy Central website, but it doesn't work well in all countries due to the nature of their streaming method (buffering.. buffering..). What level of piracy is it, to open the Daily Show website, be exposed to their ads, then actually watch it from another location? Another amusing point on this is, if you watch it in the U.S. you are presented with ads at the breaks. Watch it in Mexico: no ads.
Have we not already come to the agreement that the problem is not piracy, but the lack of access in our new global arena? None of us here would be so naive as to believe that piracy will end when each of us have access regardless of our geographical location, but at least then we will be able to have a real conversation about it.