DISQUS

"And also from the cost side - in the internet era the cost of distribution is zero, so whereas previously the industry had to make a margin on the costs of physical production, transport and retail distribution of media that is no longer necessary."

That is seriously inaccurate... who pays for the bandwidth to distribute the content, who pays for the storage to store it, who bears the cost of ingestion, who bears the cost of quality assurance, who merchandises it, who develops the recommendation algorythm etc?

While I agree that digital distribution reduces the costs, they are NOT zero... plus if we constantly think about copyrighted content as somthing that should be distributed for free there will no longer be any incentives to produce it. I have heard people argue that music producers should make their money from concerts and live performances which is fine if you're Madonna or Coldplay but if you're starting out, you need music sales revenue. Also, most of Madonna's music is not actually written by her so without some sort of reveneue derived from the sale of master recordings, how will the composers make a living...