scholvin:

Good lord.

By now everyone has seen David Lowery’s flawed but interesting article on the morality of file sharing and what that means for musicians.

And by now everyone has seen the backlash, where he’s taken to task repeatedly by a bunch of ham-fisted idiots calling him a luddite and a dinosaur and more. One oft-cited example is this sneering clown at huffpo who took his fingers out of his asshole long enough to type that the current situation is pretty much the same as making mix tapes.

I don’t really need to unpack that, so I won’t. It’s idiotic on its face.

Here’s the thing that Lowery only hinted at and the others missed completely: we now have a generation, maybe two, that doesn’t see any reason to pay for recorded music. It’s a completely alien concept to them. Whether that’s due to the available technology or something else, I don’t know and I don’t think it matters, because that horse is already under the bridge and he ain’t coming back.

I have first hand experience here, so listen up: it is harder now to make a living as a recording artist than at any time since just after the advent of recording. If that doesn’t trouble you, if you think that it’s fine or even necessary for those lazy, hippie artists to need day jobs, too, then I feel bad for you, because an important part of you is dead.

(emphasis mine)

John hits the nail on the head here.