>>56714
co-operative economics.
the marginal cost of uploading paywalled content is negligible while the marginal utility gained from feeling you've made other people happy is - even if also negligible - likely higher. (otherwise why would you do it?)
What lies at the root of this is of course the oddity of trying to sell digital files. Instead of selling the service of creating the files (via commissions) or the labour of selling the files (by having a donation-only patreon), artists are trying to sell the files themselves as commodities. The problem here is that the cost of reproducing those commodities is so much lower than the price charged for them in the first place, making it trivial for others to create further reproductions and pass them on. Complaining about people engaging in the perfectly rational action of sharing instead of showing artists that alternative business models exist is a Candlemakers' Petition.
Furthermore there is an additional psychological problem, the one of taking something that people mentally believe used to be free and imposing a cost for it. Even if people value the goods and services more than they value the cost they're being charged, the move from so much as $0.00 to $0.01 is psychologically grating. (Not to mention in digital terms, imposing a not-insignificant extra burden of setting up payments where in real life you can hand over cash with ease.) An illustrative story: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost-of-free-doughnuts-70-years-of-regret
This is doubly the case because art is now distributed - when paid for - over the internet via patreon rather than in CD form, and we don't usually mentally value digital goods the same way we do physical goods. (Which in large part is an accurate assessment on our part, the labour theory of price is long outdated.) So you still have that mental perception that what's being sold was once free. Even if this expectation and understanding is wrong, expectations matter and it would be much easier for artists to go with the grain than try and fight it because - as we see - it's quite ineffective.
The real economic question that fascinates me is why furries in general are so willing to hand over their money. Simply having higher than average disposable income (either genuinely, or via a combination of welfare and low living costs - i.e. living with parents.) wouldn't seem to explain it alone. Is it because people feel a sense of community with the people that they're giving money to? Is it because buying things becomes a matter of conspicuous consumption as much as of wanting the artwork? I genuinely don't know, and I'm quite annoyed we'll probably never get a serious paper on the topic.