Musicians don't think the world owes them a living. In fact I can scarcely think of an endeavour which requires more individuality and self-reliance than music. Your callousness ("they should get another job instead") and propensity to attribute sloth and recidivism to us, when all we're asking for is that people pay a fair price to listen to the music they love, is unseemly and saddening.

As for your facile lecture in economic theory: the problem, quite simply, is that people "aren't prepared to pay enough money" because they've grown accustomed to acquiring their music through illegal means (partly, admittedly, as a result of missteps from the industry itself). By your argument, whenever we encounter a situation where the technology is such that copying can occur at zero-cost, we should just throw are hands in the air and say "that's it, there's nothing we can do: economic theory dictates that this has no value".

By that argument, Microsoft Windows or Office has no value; its price should be zero. There should not, in fact, exist software whose price is non-zero. Movies, too, should not cost anything. They should be given away for free in stores, because you can copy them too.

But why stop there? Why enforce property rights at all? After all, it requires a massive investment in the form of a police force to stop or dissuade me, for example, from burgling your home. Stopping property theft requires political will. Intellectual property enforcement is different in practice but not in principle. The goal has to be to raise the cost of downloading music illegally until the majority cease to do so and purchase it through legal means.

In the final instance, if a potential customer thinks the prices charged for CDs are excessive, he/she has the right not to listen to them. But if he/she chooses to listen, then damn straight they'd better pay the asking price! -- as I mention above, massive amounts of effort, blood, sweat, and love went into creating it. It is right and proper that that work be rewarded.

In conclusion, the public should pay for albums, not because he/she "owes it" to the musician, because by not doing so (and still listening to the album, as several people on this thread have advocated), you're taking away the freedom of the musician to set the price of his/her music as he/she sees fit.

It's as if you ran into a Luis Vuitton store with a gun and said: "Your prices are too high! Give me that handbag for free!" Nobody in their right mind would defend that behaviour, even if there's general agreement that said handbags are over-priced. The reason is that it is Luis Vuitton's right, as the maker of the handbags, to determine what the price for them is; not yours as a consumer to demand a certain price and steal it if you don't get that price.

Again: we're saying: "I think this CD is worth 8 pounds. If you want to listen to it, pay me that amount. If not, then don't listen to it".

There are many ways of obtaining music legally now. I live in the UK, and pay ten pounds a month to use Spotify (which I heartily recommend, it's an awesome program and works even works on Linux with wine), and I pay another ten pounds to use napster.co.uk (which lets me listen to their entire catalogue from my browser). Or I can get the music through iTunes. Or amazonmp3. Or if I'm a hi-fi purist, I can buy the CD.

If you're too cheap to pay 10 pounds a month to have legal access to a massive catalogue of music, then just admit it -- spare us musicians your hypocritical self-righteousness. You basically admit you steal music, and then you have the gall to lecture us about "owing us a living". To paraphrase the Arctic Monkeys: "Who’d want to be man of the people with people like you?"