[clicks]

> Despite all the music out there, people continue to gravitate towards the big record label stars. Nobody is competing by producing something people like as much as Rihanna, except cheaper.

You seem to be under the impression that people determined her art to be of greater value and thus a higher demand for it was created than all of Rihanna's competitors. That is only very slightly true. Demand for Rihanna's music is created mostly by record companies' aggressively promoting it and advertising it in various venues, not because people decided with no outside influence that her music is better than the competitors'. Rihanna won because her record company is better at salesmanship than her competitors. Now her popularity is soaring in a bandwagon effect, as is typical of popstars or really any popular phenomenon.

Your point that music should not be free because of its marginal cost of production being zero is an interesting one -- just as there isn't an expectation for the iPhone price to be $200, it does indeed make sense that music shouldn't be free. But, with all the talk about capitalism being a faulty economic system these days, a particular recipient of rage -- and rightfully so, in my opinion -- is that entity which charges bad prices [1] for its goods. Now, you might be wondering why it's music which gets all this drama about people objecting to its costs, and not the banking sector or something. That's because it's a thing that's close to people -- everyone listens to music, and naturally everyone wonders why it costs so much when the means of its distribution are effectively zero.

Personally I think we as a society need to first think deeply about corporations that operate essentially on a rentiering model of monetization (the recent wave of 'sharing startups' are a prime example) and then we should worry about what is a good model of music distribution. But hey, record companies are basically rentiering companies as well.

[1]: Bad as in socially or morally irresponsible. If some company finds a cure for cancer -- and that cure, it turns out requires only $2 to make for every pill, it would not be ethical to charge an exorbitant price like $20,000 for it, no matter how much the research costs were (people dying is a bigger concern than people not getting paid). This is obviously an extreme example, but you get the point.

[tptacek]

Wait, hold on. Exactly why is it legitimate to feel outrage over entities that assign bad prices for luxury goods like music? In our economic system, those entities should either (a) progress us towards discovering the real value of those goods to their consumers (ie, they were worth more than people offended by the price thought), or (b) be punished by the marketplace.

Exactly nobody is harmed by an entity that charges $100 for a single song. Where does the "outrage" enter the picture?

Are you sure you're being rational here?

[clicks]

> In our economic system, those entities should either (a) progress us towards discovering the real value of those goods to their consumers or (b) be punished by the marketplace.

Speaking for a moment only about the everyday man's necessities of life (luxuries are not included; food, shelter - and music (i.e. culture) are), it seems to me that letting reign that tentative and fickle process of price discovery is an act that can potentially cost dearly. When biodiesel fuel was once thought to be a promising source of energy a few years back, prices of food promptly shot up and this resulted in the poor having difficultly affording food.

Now, I am aware this makes for a tenuous argument if we're talking about music, but I don't think it is outright inapplicable. Consider not the one-off luxury item, consider items you expect mass public to consume in large quantities -- consider itunes, a highly scaled platform which can now just sit and take in money. Indeed itunes bears a responsibility by virtue of it being a highly scaled avenue to buy music from -- unlike a local store which can only dream of seeing such business traffic, to charge reasonable prices. I think any such platform is obliged by social responsibility to charge a reasonable price. That in a purely capitalistic economy this is not a reasonable expectation, I think is one of its great faults.

tptacek, I'm sure I am being rational here, but what value is my confirmation of this to you? :) I have elsewhere on HN made note of my socialistic views, I recognize it is not proper of me to digress into vague political tangents (they're the worst), and I apologize for having done that, I'll stop here.

[tptacek]

So what's happening here is that you're citing "our economic system" while attempting to relitigate the concept of a market. The "tell" for that is your use of the term "reasonable price". If you think there's a "reasonable price" for music that any seller is in any way obliged to offer, you probably don't really believe in market economies.

[rayiner]

I'm not going to say I think our existing system is without flaws, but here's some food for thought: pop media is a wholesome product. It doesn't destroy the environment like Apple's or Samsung's phones. It doesn't con people into giving up personal information like Facebook. It doesn't take advantage of desperate third world labor like everything Wal-Mart sells. It doesn't use up scarce resources like gasoline production, contribute substantially to our carbon footprint like shipping, pollute precious water resources like manufacturing, clog up our rivers like farming. It doesn't destroy our precarious fish stocks like the seafood restaurant I went to last night. Music and movies are actually priced so most people can afford them, unlike say life-saving drugs or medical care.

So even if we're reevaluating the basics of our economy, it seems to me like music and movies are among the last things that deserve our philosophical ire.

[icebraining]

> It doesn't destroy the environment like Apple's or Samsung's phones.

"Looking at the 44 concerts, U2 will create enough carbon to fly all 90,000 people attending one of their Wembley dates (in London) to Dublin," Helen Roberts, an environmental consultant for carbonfootprint.com, told the Belfast Telegraph. Put another way, U2's CO2 emissions are reportedly the equivalent to the average annual waste produced by 6,500 British people, or the same as leaving a lightbulb running for 159,000 years. [1]

> It doesn't con people into giving up personal information like Facebook.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/arts/music/jay-z-is-watchi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...

> It doesn't take advantage of desperate third world labor like everything Wal-Mart sells.

Wal-Mart sells pop media.

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/jul/10/u2-world-tour-c...

[tedunangst]

Ironically, "musicians should tour nonstop" is the most popular answer for how they should sustain themselves while giving away free music.

[rayiner]

You're comparing apples and oranges. The carbon footprints of iPhones alone sold in a single quarter is in the millions of tons. You point to a couple of privacy breaches versus Facebook whose entire business model is based on breaching privacy.

[icebraining]

The carbon footprints of iPhones alone sold in a single quarter is in the millions of tons.

Yes, and humans exhale almost a billion of tons in the same period. I don't think just measuring the total is very helpful; you'd need to analyze carefully the value of each things, and what they replaced. How many carbons were saved when teenagers start defining themselves based more on their smartphones that on their cars?

You point to a couple of privacy breaches versus Facebook whose entire business model is based on breaching privacy.

Sure, but being less bad than Facebook is not an achievement.

[clicks]

> pop media is a wholesome product

That could not be further from the truth though, pop media is trash. Would you want your children exposed to the misogynistic, sexist, racist content being pushed by record companies these days?

We have been talking about environmental sustainability for a long time... pollution is bad, rare material scarcity is bad - it is time we started caring just as much about social sustainability. Pop media 40 years ago had stars that partook in peace activism, the founder of the most famous band wrote peace anthems like 'Imagine' and 'Give Peace a Chance', the most popular stars today are all involved in pointless stupid drama- Rihanna (beaten viciously by a guy, still wants to protect him), Thickle (http://vimeo.com/64611906), Cyrus - the girl my little sister was a big fan of when she was younger is making videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2FRPA3Gf8.

A lot of pop media content is anti-intellectual, a lot of it objectifies women, a lot of it perpetuates racism. It is markedly worse than it once used to be. And there is less of an expectation of a news program or a record company to place the interests of its consumers before its own than there used to be. This is a problem, because it is very much polluting the minds of our young (and old).