"While the data itself is free, or very cheap indeed" The data isn't what you are paying for. You are paying for the years of experience and creativity involv

"While the data itself is free, or very cheap indeed" The data isn't what you are paying for. You are paying for the years of experience and creativity involved with creating the album. Also, this isn't really for you to decide. The market decides this. It's been forced upon the artists and the record labels by people illegally downloading and copying music, but this isn't the market. "Look at IT for a moment. For nearly every commercial IT product out there, you see free alternatives." We aren't talking about a band like Metallica coming out and competing with Metallica with free music. We are talking about making copies of Metallica and competing with the music that actually costs money. "Yet the commercial stuff turns decent profit. Some companies sell services for the free product and make a decent buck." This is one of the only ways to make money with free software, aside from donations and advertising. Good, free software has only been around for 10 years. Eventually, it will drive the cost of commercial software down to nothing. This is why I stopped selling applications and moved everything to services. "And, perhaps surprisingly, developers of free software also manage to get jobs and gigs. Both ecosystems thrive. Musicians can -- and sometimes actually do -- follow that way too." I'm glad you mentioned developers, because there is another consequence of having so much free software. Because there is so much free software out there, most businesses don't really need engineers anymore. The difficult parts of the software are already out there, for free. They just need to hire someone to make custom changes to it, which can usually be done with a much less-experienced developer at a much cheaper rate. Most business owners aren't tech-savvy enough to realize this right now, but as the younger generation starts to own more businesses, it's only going to get worse for developers. I've already started seeing this. The hypocritical part about all of this is that if mass amounts of companies started ignoring the GNU license and putting code in their proprietary apps, many of the same pro-piracy people would be talking about "theft" and "stealing code". I've seen this with pretty much every discussion about a company violating the GNU on HN. "Now you were telling us the album prices weren't inflated? And don't even get me started on product bundling -- where you'd have to buy an album with a dozen songs to get one or two decent." No, I'm saying people used that as a reason why they were pirating and now that you can get albums at a very cheap price, piracy hasn't stopped or slowed, it's only gotten worse. "where you'd have to buy an album with a dozen songs to get one or two decent." Somehow instead of not buying albums, people continued to buy them at this price..as if it was a matter of life and death.