[brookst]

I don’t think this is true. At least in music, bands make far more money from touring and merch than they do from music sales.

If copyright disappeared altogether, most smaller artists would be just fine because they have loyal fans and adjacent monetization strategies.

See: Grateful Dead. They did just fine despite encouraging infringement of IP.

IMO copyright mostly serves to protect the very biggest artists and companies, not the small ones.

[gmokki]

I think the point was that the big corporations get the money from selling music.

And saying that bands currently make more money from touring kind of proves the point. They get too low % cut of music sales.

[TeMPOraL]

But the point of the response is that "getting money from selling music" is, in digital era, artificial scarcity. I.e. the copyright laws that big corporations are lobbying for continued enforcement and tightening, are the very thing that create this artificial scarcity that they are best positioned to profit off.

Cut out copyright, and no one will be getting any money from selling music per copy (or equivalent) - as it should be.

[CptFribble]

digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's not the copied bits that are the resource, it's attention. we only have so much time and attention for consuming media, and only so much attention and memory space in our brains for keeping track of where to find it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and limit the average person's apparent choice.

this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.

[brookst]

Are you talking about mere distribution? In that case, a few large players leveraging scale to drive costs down to near zero sounds great.

I’m still not seeing how lack of copyright hurts small artists or consumers. Small distributors, maybe, but that’s not doing harm to the arts.