> The guys making whale blubber were not going to persist in doing it once
> the market caved, and no one would continue to be interested in their
> product. If the analogy is to the selling of recordings, not records. i.e
.> not to a physical product necessarily, then one must point out that the
> workers do continue to be interested in the making (that would be everyone
> reading this), and there continues to be a pool of folks interested in the
> results.
They may be interested in *hearing* the results, but the number of people
interested in *paying* for them is dwindling, and continues to dwindle.
I think you missed his point, which is that the number of people voluntarily willing to *make* music (with high quality and easy distribution because of new technology) is large and the vast majority of those people are not dependent on being paid for it. If lots of people were willing to do plumbing for free, the price of plumbers would plummet.
There are only a few things that people will voluntarily do without being paid, and for which there are currently professions where people can make a decent living. In most of those cases, the people being paid well are highly exceptional and rare - e.g. professional athletes - and sometimes the rarity is due to marketing or artificial scarcity rather than content, and in those cases it's the people who market it or create artificial scarcity that are the ones who get paid.
...Tim...
