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The emergence of online providers aggregating illegal content from streaming platforms is rekindling the debate about online piracy. In the past, the discussion mainly focused on the impact of piracy in content industries and the effect of anti-piracy measures. But little is known about one crucial aspect of piracy: consumers' motivations to use illegal channels. Yet, understanding consumers' behavior could help practitioners and policymakers to allocate their resources better to fight online piracy. In this paper, we fill this gap by focusing on two main motives for the illegal consumption of online content: paying lower (zero) prices and having access to content that is not available in legal channels. To disentangle the role of each motivation in consumers' choice, we ran a laboratory experiment with real consumption, a methodology that provides participants with incentives to reveal their true preferences about consumption while controlling for the choice environment and the consideration set. Our results suggest that consumers turn to illegal channels primarily to save on the price of content, and that they are less sensitive to the availability of content in legal and illegal channels. We discuss the implications of our findings for practitioners and policymakers.

International audience; This article draws on the theory of disruption to analyze the impact of digital technology on the recorded music industry and to explain the delay of dominant firms in reacting to this technological discontinuity. The author shows that digitization matches the characteristics of disruptive innovation as described in the literature. He explains why established firms initially paid little heed to an innovation leading to a product (digital music files) that is cheaper and poorer in quality than their existing product (CDs) and ill-suited to mainstream consumers. The reaction of these firms has been typical of the behaviour of companies facing disruptive innovation. Confronted with an innovation that they see as more of a threat than an opportunity, incumbent firms have found it extremely difficult to accept the need for a radical rethinking of their business model.