Talk:Controversy Concerns/@comment-173.101.105.159-20150102081135/@comment-53539-20150102093750

Having been with a number of fandoms at this point. I'll give an example from the One Piece fandom. We had a discussion in the One Piece fandom where we asked what we had done to support the series. I'd bought 4 P.O.P. figurines and was buying the English manga version. But there was a number of fans in the conversation those reply was "nothing, why put money into something I can download for free!". As far as they were concerned, Oda's making a mint, ergo he doesn't miss a buck if they don't buy the product.

However... This is the issue at hand, the fact some are buying the One Piece in the first place is what makes it popular. If nobody bought the series, then it wouldn't get anywhere. But if everyone who was calling themselves a fan actually put something into their fandom, then what they were a fandom of would have been, or would be, far more popular.

This was an issue in the late 90s and early 00s when the amount of illegal downloads of music had become a problem. The results were that sales of music were going down, it was the same with movies and TV shows. The impact on them was noticeable and in some cases with a extremely high number of downloads was put down to the reason why that particular product failed. this is also notable in VY2's case because his illegal download numbers put him on par with Kagamine's sales numbers and if they had been sales number would make him on par with the Big 8.

Nothing is free, it costs millions of $/£/etc to make one. If nobody buys the merchandise or the DVDs, soundtrack, etc, then the product can't make a buck. Its been an issue since the 80s when VHS first came along.

This isn't so bad for vocaloids like the Big 8 who may get a uber ton of merchandise, but honestly... Thats 1/6 or 1/7 of the vocaloids. What about the rest?

Basically, the software has already seen several 100,000s of illegal downloads. Take for instance Miku. Yet the most successful V2 was Miku and she only had 60,000 sales. A fraction of the amount of sales people download of vocaloid. :-/

If half of the number of people who download illegally bought it then legally, we'd have less of a problem.