Matt Yglesias has a good post up on the Grokster case. But it’s a side point he makes that caught my attention:
A world where you can’t make a profit selling albums would radically alter the music business but not, I think, kill it off. Recording music is relatively cheap, being a rock star is cool, the vast majority of artists make very little money off CD sales, and musicians have alternative sources of revenue.
Others have made this point: that the business model of the music industry is going to change from one in which touring and merchandise support recorded music, to one in which recorded music supports touring and merchandise. As someone who buys records and CDs and goes to see live music, I’m not sure I’m happy about that. After all, the price of live music will likely rise in direct proportion to the “free rider” problem of file sharing. Forty dollar concert tickets, I imagine, will become a norm. Certain acts - which seemed to split into baby boomer nostalgia acts like the Eagles and gay male icons like Madonna or Cher - have already raised their ticket prices to market rate. Now that the logic of record promotion is falling away, you will see more doing so. The plus side is that scalping will disappear. The minus side is that live performance will no longer be integral to younger listeners’ experience of music.
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