From wikipedia’s entry on the Tepito market in Mexico City:
Statistics show that eight out of ten CDs purchased in Mexico come from “pirate” distributors, causing “losses” to the music industry that is claimed to exceed seven hundred million dollars.
I am continually amazed by the hostility displayed by the so called capitalist class of society to actually existing free markets. The distinction between trade monopolists and real free markets is brilliantly explored by the historian Fernand Braudel, whose books on the economic history of capitalism are the best I know on the subject. The music industry has spent decades pricing itself out of its own market, disregarding developments in recording production technology that has made it cheaper to produce quality music, digital distribution advances, and then somehow expects people to believe that it has lost $700 million from a market in a country where the GDP per capita is about $14k, or, stated another way, 1/35th of the average person’s income? This is an industry that can’t die quickly enough.