Every band I've ever gone to see sells CDs at their shows, and they're mostly the kinds of bands you describe.

> keep a day job

"Producing less of it" because they can't earn enough to do it full time. There would be more people in that boat if, in my thought experiment, they earned absolutely nothing from their content. I don't think we'd actually ever reach that point, but just think about it as a 'what if'.

When you pay a door fee to see a show, you are paying for the content: a live band performing their songs.

Also: some bands sell CDs, some give them away, lately fewer are selling, but instead are giving away passes at download sites. Even those that sell the CDs give away at least half if not more of them, because they would rather people listen to them and come back for the next show, and tell their friends, making $3-10 per person per show, than make $10 on the CD one time.

No, you're not paying for the content itself, you're paying for the band's time, and the limited amount of space in the venue - like you said, the performance; but not the content. Those are both scarce resources, whereas the actual bits are not: you could stream that out on the internet to a virtually infinite number of people.

Now, how about authors?

Actually, you are paying for the content too. The content is the driver for the scarce space in a venue. Ever been to a concert bar on nights without a show? They are dead, there is no reason to be there without the music. Similarly, most people don't say "will there be a band there tonight?", they say "which band will be there tonight?", implying the music is at least as important as the fact there is a band and a bar. Putting it on the internet doesn't actually matter, many venues do that, and are sold out anyway. Being on the scene is actually important to a lot of people.

As for authors, I wasn't talking about them, and I'm not going to play strawman games with you.

> As for authors, I wasn't talking about them, and I'm not going to play strawman games with you.

Authors are producers of 'information goods' too, and I hardly think such a large category of people constitutes a 'strawman'. It's an issue that to them is very real - musicians can sort of fall back on performances, but authors can't.

("thought experiment"--you keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means. What are your terms? What are you trying to show? How does one lead to the other?)

How many artists produce one-hit-wonders and then do basically nothing else, living off of payments? How many other artists produce more in their free time (Zappa, Waits, Infected Mushroom) then others do in their career (Chinese Democracy lol).

Producing less of it, yeah, maybe. But people seem to be forgetting that producing content or enriching content creators is not the goal of copyright law. It's supposed to "further the progress of science and the useful arts", and there is clearly a tradeoff between allowing people to copy versus allowing creators to monetize their creations.

It's supposed to be a tradeoff, exactly. The reason why you want producers to get money is so that they can keep producing stuff you like.

So it is only a tradeoff when they get all the money they possibly can by making the stuff less useful to us? Sorry, that is absurd. No one is saying they shouldn't be paid, just paid with a different model, that the tech has changed, and the model should change with it. Preserving the status quo, against the changes wrought by technical progress (a useful art resulting from scientific progress) is sort of the opposite of "furthering the progress" of those things.

Ok, fine, which model(s)? There's way too much dancing around this from many advocates of eliminating IP laws completely. I am not an advocate of keeping things completely as-is - the producers have too much clout - but think there would be a risk of tossing the baby out with the bathwater were there ever a serious consideration of radically curtailing IP laws. And by radically, I don't just mean shortening the terms, I would consider that quite sensible.

Well, First of all, I am not advocating completely getting rid of copyright. I am arguing for a change to it, and that there are business models that don't require draconian bullshit and law buying. But keep fighting that strawman if you want.

I would like to see copyright shortened to 2-5 years for exclusive distribution rights. I would like to see attribution requirements extended to say, 100 years. If you want to use the work, fine, but make sure you mention your work's pedigree. (altho at some point, its going to be either so known and part of the cultural zeitgeist that you don't need it and attribution requirements become a burden, or it won't matter, hence the 100 years). I would like to see unauthorized distribution fines go down to something reasonable, say 200% of the nominal cost at time of distribution + any profits made, and a reasonable fine on top of it (say $100). Since most people distribute for free, we should treat file sharing the same as a speeding ticket not a life changer - the fine system keeps the worst of the offenders relatively at bay. (it is bullshit position to think we should stop every last one of them every last time)

As for business models that work: Why do we need to know up front? Seriously, this here is a disingenuous argument. Instead, do like the tech industry does: stop propping up a bad business model with laws, and let the giants fade as better models come along and take their place. As the big companies decline or innovate, new ones will come along and mostly fail, but at some point, one will figure it out. I once heard someone say "silicon valley is just a big monte carlo simulation of business models". So lets just do that.

My point is not that they shouldn't be paid. The question is how it was decided that suing college kids and moms for copyright infringement to protect enormous profits by media conglomerates and moving towards increasingly punitive IP enforcement is the appropriate tradeoff. It doesn't seem the media companies acknowledge there should be any tradeoff.

Try stopping into to some of those recording studios and having an in-depth conversation about how they're being impacted by online copyright infringement. I have, and while most accept it as a fact of life now, they will also explain how it is hurting their business and ability to make music professionally.

> giving away CDs at shows to keep people coming to the next show

No band in the world does this. They SELL CDs at shows, because it's one of the few ways they can generate enough cash flow to buy gas and food.

I guess it's possible, but extremely unlikely, that I am just so cool that they want to give me a free copy to share with people, but I have legitimately never paid for local band's music. By this I mean a band member or representative will give me CDs or Download links all the time. Usually I stop by the table to grab a couple band stickers or a tshirt, and they ask if I want a CD (usually I don't, my live music preferences are much different than my recorded preferences but I still want to encourage their performing). When I decline, they just hand me one anyway and say here take it anyway. If I point out that I wouldn't listen to it, I prefer this music live, they say "give it to a friend".

Basically my point is, they won't decline the money, but they still want their name out there bad enough to make the trade-off. Particularly when it's download coupons rather than CDs (which have an up-front cost). Similarly all the recoding studios in my town are booked up solid, and the better dozen or so sound engineers are never hurting for work. (And this is a pretty small town, 200K pop in the greater metro area).