Russell if I can make more profit with less risk then why take the risk of piracy?
I will not call it stealing because it’s copyright infringement. But I will say people just want to make a buck and if you give them ways to do this without hurting artists the vast majority of fans would choose that option.
Competitors on the other hand might encourage piracy of a competing artist which is why you might want to form alliances.
This is a matter of incentives. You have plenty of money which can be made here and only the very greedy would have to become pirates.
Last but not least, piracy doesn’t work well when you can’t keep up with the production rate of the artist. If the artist is releasing a song at a time and you don’t know what is next then as a pirate you have to compete with the fan distribution network as well as try to anticipate the moves of the artist in advance.
Say I’m a fan and I can download a song for free or buy the token? Since I don’t know what the token is worth and I can earn tokens by buying them from the artist if I’m into the idea that the artist could provide future value I would buy the token. Then if I have these tokens I’m not going to market the pirate site because that would reduce the value of my tokens.
If it’s easier to buy the tokens and the tokens are cheap why not just buy the tokens if I have the money to play that game? If I play that game I could turn $20 into $2000 if the album is a hit. If I don’t play that game then I get as much free music as I want but I can’t make money from it (and instead a pirate takes all the money).
Why would I make a pirate money when I can make that money myself as a fan?