Comment Sea Change (Score 1) 419
They are the slow-mo collapse of an Age. The very idea of paying for content has become passe for anyone under the age of 30. My wife and I pay for Netflix because it's convenient. Everyone I know younger than us goes to the movies on Bit Torrent. Yes, that's anecdotal, but larger socioeconomic trends lend credence to personal observation.
Student loans and massive unemployment for millenials has put severe pressure on their disposable income. And it's been going on for at least 7 years. That's the formative years of the generation's early adulthood spent in penury when their predecessors have formed brand attachments and gotten started on careers making increasingly better wages. Check the news articles about how car ownership among younger cohorts is declining steeply, or how student loan default rates are rising sharply.
That means that those age cohorts are learning how to live differently than their older siblings or parents because they have to. They rent instead of own, they bike instead of drive, they torrent instead of paying. It all goes hand-in-hand, and the longer our system insists on beggaring them, the less likely they are to change even if/when conditions improve.
Of course, there's also the possibility that our system will not stop beggaring them and will move up the age cohort scale to completely beggar others too. Reverse mortgages are off to a great start to nuke the traditional wealth transfer that occurs when one generation leaves this earth to its descendents.