If on the other hand, you stop paying for copies (make your own), and instead pay the artists you like to produce the art you like, then you will get what you want.

Until that point, you’re going to have to put up with the airwaves and commercially supported channels being flooded by LoCoDed ‘content’, aka soma.

The solution is obvious (fans paying artists), but until people realise it, it’s going to take some time arriving.

Only crappy “music” such as Jackson, Britneyslut and Madonacrap kind of stuff might qualify as a service since usually people can not listen to this kind of crap for very long.

Once the few seriously brainwashed nostalgic who keep listening to this for a little while longer die all these stuffs die with them and is forgotten.

But the good music remain for centuries and people want to keep it carefully.

It is amazing to see how the quality of music went way down from the 19th to the 20th century.

Most of the good music people where listening too during the 20th century was actually produced in the previous centuries or at least strongly inspired by it.

Once you let greedy corporate parasites control the art this is what you got: Crap!

These are the services in music that are worth paying good money for:
Songwriting
Composition, Scoring (etc.)
Singing (live or studio)
Instrumentation (live or studio)
Performing (live or studio)
Production, Mixing, Recording, etc. (live or studio)
Pressing, Manufacturing, aka ‘making a material copy’ (Vinyl, CD, memory chip)

The market for digital copies (or streams) is dead, but doctor fricking Frankenstein keeps on trying to send 50 megavolts of lightning into it to re-animate it. It won’t work.

There’s now a free market in services and the middleman mafiaa that is used to creaming off 99% of all the money that changes hands can’t get ACTA to put the file-sharers back in Pandora’s box. Those days have gone. We can now all make copies for nothing, and stream music for nothing. Why pay for it? Because it’s illegal to do it yourself? Fuck that.

The market that remains is in the services I’ve just listed, and it’s now a free market thanks to the Internet. So Ted Cohen is on the right track, but he’s got to realise that selling legal copies, licensed streams, or ‘licensing copyright’ in any other way is NOT A SERVICE (no work occurs!), just as DRM is not a means of letting the punter do what they want. Selling means ‘being given money for’, and money is equivalent to work, and work is exchanged for work, not liberty (that’s a ransom). So people are only going to exchange their labour for the musician’s labour. They aren’t going to exchange it (enthusiastically) for the publisher letting them have a tiny piece of their liberty back.

‘Rights holders’ (as in ‘the bastards holding our rights’) do not have any prospect of achieving success before them, except through ever more draconian measures to reduce the people’s cultural liberty. That is not going to go down too well.

So, for heck’s sake get a clue, and get back in the business of selling services that actually live up to the definition, i.e. involve work.

So, if you’re a singer, songwriter, composer, instrumentalist, performer, production engineer, or manufacturer of material copies, there’s a market for your WORK.

If you have a state granted monopoly that suspends the public’s right to perform or make copies of a published work, throw it in the bin, it’s a dud. Try working for once.