Why It’s Hard to Charge for Music
Music has value. The people who create it deserve to be paid for the talents and labours. So why has it become so hard to charge for music? Salon takes this look.
Water is incredibly useful. None of us would last more than a day or two without it. By contrast, most of us get along just fine with no diamonds. So water is, in an important sense, much more valuable than diamonds. And yet diamonds are much moreexpensive than water, since there’s a scarcity of diamonds (thanks in no small part to some nefarious cartel activities) whereas water is fairly abundant. Such is the logic of capitalism, for better or for worse.
And that’s the problem with any analysis of revenue options for the music industry that’s based on getting people to subjectively value music: