The issue that is being ignored here is that when one pays for "legal" music the actual amount to goes to the artist is in most cases zero and in those cases where there is an actual net royalty to the artist *the very famous" artists it is a minuscule percentage. The bulk of the revenue goes the "music industry" which has been made obsolete by changing technology. Digital distribution of music is fundamentally different than pressing vinyl or even pressing CDs, in that there is minimal up front up capital required so there is no need for a capitalist to provide this capital. A simple pay what you want approach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_what_you_want will yield the artist way more by eliminating parasites such as "the music industry" or Apple with its 30% big brother tax. Of course the gross is far less, but would you rather as an artist receive 95% of say 2 USD or 0.0001% of 20 USD?
The same is also the case with book / ebook publishers and authors, and the parasitic scientific publishing industry, vs scientists in University Industry or Government. These dying parasitic corporate players are causing a lot of damage with "technologies" such as DRM that attempt to protect "intellectual property". DRM and the attempt to protect "intellectual property" is among the greatest threats to civil liberties and individual freedom in most western counties. It is also the ultimate cause of a very significant and rising portion of China's greenhouse gas emissions.
Edit: One only has to compare the relative Developer ranking in
https://www.coingecko.com/en of Monero 81 (Pay what you want) vs Ethereum 74 (Traditional capitalist IPO model). Z.cash is following the Ethereum model with its 11% pre-mine to fund the venture capitalists. Those pictures of spinning diamonds did not come cheap.
ArticMine, one of my points is we need to enable fans to pay musicians directly for music without a middleman taking most of it (ditto other digital creations perhaps such as video, but video is quite different from music in usage patterns). This what for example Bandcamp is doing (taking a 15% fee, although the credit card companies take another 5+%) and btw the CTO/co-founder Shawn Grunberger used to work in Tech support at Fractal Design when I was a Programmer and I interfaced with him on my own initiative as a liason. I even was the one who encouraged him to become a programmer and I remember he was telling me his idea for Bandcamp back then in 1995. So he finally did it. Congrats to him. Unfortunately he did not reply to my attempt to contact him, so they may find soon they have me as a competitor rather than as an ally. C'est la vie.
Bandcamp has a weakness in their model in that one can only sample a few of the songs for free. (Also I found their app navigation and music finding UI is poorly designed, as well no social features!) Sorry but that is why Bandcamp doesn't have the wide distribution and 150 million musicians that SoundCloud has.
You don't put a paywall in front of your users and expect to achieve popularity. That is a fundamental tenet of marketing and attrition minimization. Perhaps they understand the market better than me, which is why I am very interested in this discussion.
I forgot to make the point in reply to r0ach that FM radio quality audio could indeed be distributed for free by musicians and this wouldn't necessarily destroy the musicians' ability to sell higher quality versions of the same songs. So I don't agree with r0ach that FM radio set a precedent for theft, because I remember I used to buy $9 - $18 CDs even though I could record from the radio station (and that even before I become rich as programmer when I was just earning a typical income as young man working odd jobs). The FM radio will have the radio DJ/host or advertising talking/fading in at the start or end of a song, it will have equalization added, it is of lower quality, and the paid CD may have additionally remix versions. I had in my 20s some hundreds of CDs and 1000s of songs that I paid for. That is why I was really pissed off when I had to buy the same songs again when I lost my CD collection due to my turbulent/adventurous life of travails and travels, so then I reverted to using means of obtaining the music for free. But still I did pay $0.99 per song over recent years at Amazon for songs I couldn't locate easily for free. And I would not prefer converting songs from Youtubes versus spending 5 - 10 cents to pay a musician directly, know I'm getting the high quality original, and have it all organized for me and so I never have to pay again for the same song and I can never lose my collection again (I am so incredibly overloaded and have not even enough time to replace the blown cigarette lighter fuse on my car, meaning I am apt to lose my song collection again because I can't keep track of everything in my life)!
ArticMine, I never understood the model of having researchers pay to obtain white papers (other than as a legacy from when journals were printing on paper and physically distributed). Researchers are not funded by their cohorts buying their white papers. I don't understand your point about DRM? Please make your point more cogent?
Btw (and entirely tangential/orthogonal to the discussion I added above), I like greenhouse emissions. If I obtain more funds, I will upsize my SUV and perhaps get a few dozen Hummers so I can make more greenhouse gases. I'll eat more beans (for farts) and cows (for their farts) too if I get healthy. The anthropogenic global warming (climate change redux/goal post moving) fraud is junk science and deception. Anyone who mentions that I immediately classify them as a kook, delusional, and incapable of researching scientific fact vs. fiction. Sorry to bust your bubble, but we are headed into a Mini Ice Age.
Bobby Jimmy & The Critters - Somebody Farted