> Remember music has been around long before there were ways to "monetize" it.

No halfway sane person will pursue music fulltime if he cannot earn a living off it. This is true and has been true throughout history. Where there previously was no revenue through the sale of recorded or sheet music, there was patronage. If the patronage system had not existed, do you really think Leopold Mozart would have devoted his efforts at training Wolfgang Amadeus from the age of 3 to pursue music, as opposed to a (fee-earning) trade or craft?

I don't deny that there will always be hobbyists. But the world will be a much poorer place, musically, if we don't allow music as a fulltime career.

> That kind of making a living with music is not going anywhere and will, in fact, greatly benefit when the "Great wall of EMI" (or Universal, or Sony, or what not..) comes down.

First, let me point out that I am one of the "underdog musicians" you speak of. You can see my band at http://www.thesignalsofficial.com, and you can hear my music at http://www.myspace.com/thesignalsproject . I'm not signed to a label, let alone a major label. I finance everything related to band out of my own pocket, and my girlfriend takes our band pictures. However, I will quit my efforts making music, at least with a band, if I don't manage to get some kind revenue off of it. To not do so would be idiotic.

Second, it appears to me that you, as many others in the Hacker News community, are imbued with an inflated sense of romanticism of the small gig as opposed to financing via recorded music or proxies thereof. I understand that there is something intimate, raw, and beautiful in witnessing a musician play one of those shows, and I can assure that as I musician, those kind of gigs are really fun to play. But what's so wrong about putting vast hours of work into lovingly recording a record, so that anyone (who pays for it) can have the benefit of enjoying well composed, arranged, produced, mixed, and mastered music from, say, his car? Why should that be valued at zero, even if the product can be copied at virtually zero cost? Why do you see it as obvious that one should pay for small gigs (and, by the way, in many cases one doesn't pay for small gigs, the best the musician has to hope for is to make a cut of the bar draw), and yet not for recorded music? Scarcity, I presume you'll say. But that argument doesn't really hold water. Consider a music festival: my ability to enjoy the music at the festival doesn't (unless massive amounts of people are involved) deprive another person of the ability to enjoy the music. So by the scarcity argument, it should be morally ok to just jump over the fence without paying. (You wouldn't have paid for the gig otherwise, right? So no harm done.) But, of course, if everyone were to do that, the musician wouldn't be left with any money to get paid with. Nobody argues that bouncers, the "authority" that forces you to pay, are repressive, anti free-speech and authoritarian. And yet if they weren't there, do you really think people would pay to see gigs? And the functional equivalent of the bouncer in the digital domain is copyright law and enforcement thereof.

I'd like to make this last point more explicit. One method that is very effective in determining whether an argument boils down to sophistry is reductio ad absurdum. In the context filesharing, it goes like this: if filesharing is a good thing, then surely more of it is an even better thing. And the limit of that process is that all music is obtained through filesharing, and in this situation, no musician will ever obtain money from recorded music. Fine, you say: make money through other means -- play gigs! But if the same free-for-all mentality you seem to espouse is valid in the digital domain, why not in the physical? Why not loudly demand an end to bouncers at clubs? After all, as I've pointed out, if it is an injustice to limit the digital distribution of music, then surely it is equally an injustice to limit physical presence at a gig by the imposition of entry fee. And if the end-the-bouncer-movement ever did manage to get political traction, then there can be no doubt that no one would pay for gigs either.