3 ms·

Before computing divorced the idea of the file from the physicality of the storage medium, music was sold as live performance, printed paper, plastic discs, or

Before computing divorced the idea of the file from the physicality of the storage medium, music was sold as live performance, printed paper, plastic discs, or magnetic tape. Those all have a non-trivial cost of reproduction. Now that music is just files, the marginal cost of sending a file down the network wire is proportional to its compressed file size, which is insignificant in relation to the cost of the human labor of creating a master recording. Also, now that music is encoded digitally, all copies are (usually) perfect reproductions of the original.

bregma 7y ago
Long before the invention of paper, plastic, magnetic tape, piano rolls, or metal drums with pins, songs and stories and other kinds of "intellectual property" could be conveyed from mind to mind verbally. Such ideas were expensive and difficult to create the original copy (ever write a song or derive Pythagoras' theorem from first principles?), but the marginal cost of each reproduction was minimal and close enough to zero. It it weren't, whoever wrote those earworms I get would be fabulously rich by now. Centuries, nay millennia, ago there were starving artists who created great works, only to have the economics of zero marginal cost of production take the food from their mouths. The appearance of and democratization of high-bandwidth telecommunication (enabled by computers, but not a property of computers) did not create that situation, it's only multiplied the zero marginal cost by a large constant. An if you've been paying attention, zero multiplied by anything is still zero.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  I think you're discounting the cost of pre-network human communication a bit too much. Before computers, it was nearly impossible to copy a musical song from one person to another faster than the time it took to perform it. And to go that fast, you needed someone trained to perform it well enough (cheap, but not free) and someone trained to memorize it by ear in one take (expensive). To do it more slowly, with more repetitions, you still needed someone that could perform what they had learned, which was cheap, but not free. The cost of connecting the teacher with the learner was likewise not free. They had to be in the same place, physically. They might meet up, learn each other's repertoire, then split up again, so as to not compete with each other by working the same territory. The invention of written musical notation was a huge leap forward, in that it enabled the profession of composer/lyricist to be separated from that of the musical performer. Millennia ago, great works were lost completely, because they were not copied enough to survive the deaths of everyone who knew how to reproduce them. That is not a thing that happens when copies are cheap. Even things that were written down have been lost, because copying written materials was not cheap enough until the printing press. If making a copy takes a specialist four hours, and consumes paper and ink, that is nowhere near "close enough to zero". Now, you can copy music in a millisecond, using a device that nearly everyone carries in their pocket, to anyone in the world who likewise carries a similar device. The cost is still not zero. It is just now too small to think about, unless you are making millions of copies per second.

bregma 7y ago

Long before the invention of paper, plastic, magnetic tape, piano rolls, or metal drums with pins, songs and stories and other kinds of "intellectual property" could be conveyed from mind to mind verbally. Such ideas were expensive and difficult to create the original copy (ever write a song or derive Pythagoras' theorem from first principles?), but the marginal cost of each reproduction was minimal and close enough to zero. It it weren't, whoever wrote those earworms I get would be fabulously rich by now. Centuries, nay millennia, ago there were starving artists who created great works, only to have the economics of zero marginal cost of production take the food from their mouths. The appearance of and democratization of high-bandwidth telecommunication (enabled by computers, but not a property of computers) did not create that situation, it's only multiplied the zero marginal cost by a large constant. An if you've been paying attention, zero multiplied by anything is still zero.

logfromblammo 7y ago
I think you're discounting the cost of pre-network human communication a bit too much. Before computers, it was nearly impossible to copy a musical song from one person to another faster than the time it took to perform it. And to go that fast, you needed someone trained to perform it well enough (cheap, but not free) and someone trained to memorize it by ear in one take (expensive). To do it more slowly, with more repetitions, you still needed someone that could perform what they had learned, which was cheap, but not free. The cost of connecting the teacher with the learner was likewise not free. They had to be in the same place, physically. They might meet up, learn each other's repertoire, then split up again, so as to not compete with each other by working the same territory. The invention of written musical notation was a huge leap forward, in that it enabled the profession of composer/lyricist to be separated from that of the musical performer. Millennia ago, great works were lost completely, because they were not copied enough to survive the deaths of everyone who knew how to reproduce them. That is not a thing that happens when copies are cheap. Even things that were written down have been lost, because copying written materials was not cheap enough until the printing press. If making a copy takes a specialist four hours, and consumes paper and ink, that is nowhere near "close enough to zero". Now, you can copy music in a millisecond, using a device that nearly everyone carries in their pocket, to anyone in the world who likewise carries a similar device. The cost is still not zero. It is just now too small to think about, unless you are making millions of copies per second.