That's funny, I recently paid $120 for two tickets to see Death Cab for Cutie perform songs live that I've heard a thousand times before on my computer.

(I've seen them live probably 7-8 times, and have likely shelled out something around $600-700 total for the privilege. Music absolutely has monetary value.)

You're paying for the performance. You wouldn't pay that just to hear the studio songs be played over the amps. And I guess you'd be fairly satisfied even if they only played songs you haven't heard before.

So you pay almost nothing (on average) to listen to the music, but you pay hundreds for other things.

All types of value can be monetized; the only trick is how. So unless music has no value whatsoever (which would be absurd, since no one would bother making it in that case), it can be monetized.

Does putting ads on a torrent site count?

This is absolutely disgusting.

Value != money.

What a sad bit of reasoning. Monetizing destroys value. The value of music and other arts has nothing to do with how well or poorly it is monetized.

Whether monetization increases or decreases other kinds of value is a topic for a different discussion; the only thing I said was that all types of value can be monetized.

And as such, the assertion is still wrong, imo. Not all types of value can be monetized.

they are risking "huge" penaties not because the value of music is zero, but because the chance of getting caught is next to zero.

risk = penalty * chance of getting caught

If there is a no risk way of getting something which otherwise has to cost you money, you'd do it. Hence piracy.

So tens of billions of dollars in sales per year for music is "almost nothing"? By such logic Amazon.com and google "almost" don't exist at all.

Considering nearly every single person on the planet listens to music of some sort, I would assert that that number really is rather small.

That number only includes sales of music online in the US. If you add in global sales, CDs, concert attendance, etc. then you get a far larger number.

At no point is that number "almost nothing" though. Hundreds of billions of dollars is more than enough to finance the global music industry and provide a generous living for all of the world's musicians.

Wikipedia has physical music sales in the top 20 countries at a mere 12 Billion total. Where are you getting your numbers? I am not seeing any numbers anywhere that would suggest anything near plural hundreds.

Also note that you are comparing an entire industry to individual technical companies.

In this case, observing the actual spending practices of people can only set a lower bound on willingness to pay. If you're obtaining something for free, it certainly doesn't preclude you from being willing to pay for it as well. The fact that people spent significantly more on music (per capita) in the past[1] -- when it wasn't nearly as easy to obtain music for free -- suggests that how much people are currently paying is probably a poor measure of their willingness to pay.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real...

Not true. I collect music and pay for it 2 or 3 times a week.