I simply cannot, for the life of me, understand why people think that it's their RIGHT to copy the works of others.

I don't think it's that hard to understand. The key is to realize that logic doesn't drive behavior. Rather, people do what comes naturally – i.e. that which is habitual – and then rationalize it as needed. The rationalization process is very strong. Logic is a mere speedbump on that road.

The only time people think carefully through a course of action is if they have no habits to fall back on.

People pirate music because they're habituated to think of music as free. The training process has been going on longer than digital music has existed, actually.

Which brings me to my observation that, of all the many dying forms of media, recorded music feels especially screwed. Yes, people pirate movies, books, and software, but somehow things seem a lot more dire among the poor musicians. Why is that?

I wonder if it's just a perfect storm of coincidence. So many things about recorded pop music make it extra-susceptible to piracy.

* Until recently, music was designed to be learned and performed by other people. That was the only way to hear it more than once. So not only is there a centuries-old tradition of performing other people's music, but there's techniques and instruments based on that art and schools to teach you how.

People often did this by ear. There's a story about Allegri's Miserere, the subject of the most famous act of music piracy in history: The Miserere was the personal property of the Pope, and would-be copyists of the work were threatened with excommunication. For 150 years it was only performed in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week. Then Mozart came to town at age 14, heard the piece at the Wednesday service, went back to his room and wrote the whole thing down from memory, came back on Friday night to listen again and make minor corrections, and gave the transcript away to be published.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)

It may seem obvious, but if we took any modern Mozart to see Pacific Rim no amount of talent would enable him to produce a reasonable cover version in a day. It would take a year and hundreds of millions of dollars. Memorizing and recopying a novel is much more achievable, but the result would not be impressive except as a stunt: It's culturally understood that novels are intended to be printed verbatim, not reinterpreted or "covered", and it would be clear to everyone that the copied version was "plagiarism", not an homage or an interpretation. And many people are literally blind to features of a novel's "performance", such as its typesetting or the quality of its paper.

Novels were born in the age of cheap printing and are adapted to it. I predict that we will soon evolve genres of music that are similarly adapted to the era of cheap copying. It's not a difficult prediction, because the selection pressure that will drive this trend is starkly obvious.

* It's human nature to repeat the music that one hears. You can't stop humming. Often even if you want to.

* There's a tradition going back nearly a century of pretending that music is free: Music on the radio, and Muzak in stores. Of course, this music is all subsidized, but people don't think about that, if they even know.

If I were David Lowery and someone handed me a time machine and a gun, of course I'd probably go back and shoot Hitler, like you do. But then I'd hunt down the inventor of Muzak. Because after two generations of being marinated in free music it's no wonder people are habituated to think that music is free-as-in-oxygen.

* Pop music's designers spent half a century promoting a culture of repeat listening, in order to encourage everyone to buy singles. So we're trained to think of pop songs as something you collect, then listen to over and over. And we know that the best pop songs are the ones that are being heavily promoted, because being able to play "the latest single" is a fashion statement, even today.

Repeat-consumption of media is not some kind of natural law, it's genre-specific. I'm a big re-reader, but I think I'm an odd case: The majority of people read books only once, which explains why, even if they do read, they don't have a house full of books. Pauline Kael wrote about movies for a living, but never watched a movie more than once. And I have a huge Pinboard log of bookmarks, but I essentially never revisit them.

And, now that the money's been sucked out of the market for "original" recordings by the "original artists", there's no reason why musical culture should continue to encourage playing the same thing twice. Many genres don't: "Never the same way twice" pretty much defines jazz. (Unfortunately, jazz also evolved in an era awash with talented, classically-trained club and theater musicians, who eventually ran out of gigs because recording had been invented. The present and future of jazz is hip-hop and club music, built of improvised rhythm and rhyme instead of improvised melody and harmony, and of sampled recordings instead of sampled melodies and progressions.)