For music distribution costs swamped the costs of generating the information for even small runs of CDs. Maybe for a smaller artist, if you included an amortize

For music distribution costs swamped the costs of generating the information for even small runs of CDs. Maybe for a smaller artist, if you included an amortized A&R costs and marketing you'd be right. But including market speculator costs in this calculation makes no sense to me. In terms of costs to the consumer, a tiny fraction of a penny went to the person generating the information anyway, if they sued to get it. Once a song was recorded they traded in it's scarcity, just like oil. And now that scarcity is completely artificial. It makes no sense to pay 99% of the cost of purchased music to a facilitator who prints CDs, vets musicians, and markets them. The internet makes the last one easier and the first two obsolete. First of all, getting people to create music and want to show it off is not hard, stopping them from doing so is hard. It has never been hard. What was hard was trying to get massively rich off of popular music. Do you really think that this massively stupid and inefficient system, hated by consumers and artists must be protected just to avoid figuring out a new way to pay artists? Artists are still making a good living these days, just more from endorsements, live shows and merch than sales of music. So that's not in danger. It's easier for beginner or smaller acts to get ahead and make a living now. Sure, some artists who would be rich under the old system won't be under another system, and vice versa. But in aggregate there is only one loser - the record company middlemen. This seems so obvious to me. Especially now, when it's already happening and plenty of people are "creating the first copy" undeterred, right now it looks like maybe there will be more successful artists but fewer mega-rich artists due to less of hit based business but that might change as the new way of doing things grows, websites are now an extreme hit based business and didn't start out that way.