What historical classical music demonstrates is that we don't need the lure of becoming independently wealthy from a few hits to motivate talented artists to pr

What historical classical music demonstrates is that we don't need the lure of becoming independently wealthy from a few hits to motivate talented artists to produce good music. This can be seen in other media as well. Many painters and now-famous authors were poor, never having been appreciated in their lifetimes. Shakespeare wasn't poor, but the money he made wasn't from copyright royalties, and he would have been a copyright infringer[1]. Your other concern (in a subcomment) of the music industry ripping off and selling artists' music in the absence of copyright merely demonstrates that there might need to be copyright protection against commercial resale, and perhaps commercial advertising or rebranding, as opposed to the wide net of current copyright law which criminalizes a significant portion of the population and puts an even larger proportion at risk of lawsuits. Consumers will buy music even if it's available for free, because even with complete discographies of the most popular modern artists available for free online, those artists are still getting rich despite piracy and despite the music industry's creative accounting. I think part of the blame for less popular artists not making a decent living lies with the major record labels for focusing public attention so narrowly on the music of a few pop stars, to the exclusion of other music that's less polished and perhaps less catchy, but (arguably) musically superior. [1] https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2011/02/18/shakespeare-and-copyright/ https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2011/02/18/shakespe...