I wrote a post a few months back about why I still buy CDs (instead of buying/stealing mp3s/AAC/etc). This has very little to do with wanting to support artists (although I do want to) and much more to do with wanting the best possible value for my money. No matter what price you pay for a CD, the long-term value is much higher than that of the equivalent mp3 (or AAC, or Ogg Vorbis, etc.) files. See that earlier post for some reasons why I believe this to be the case.
Meanwhile, however, I'm more convinced than ever that music has to be free. It already is free, of course. But much of the music business is still in denial about this. The record companies are dying (or just getting swallowed up by bigger and bigger media companies) - when I worked at the Archive of Contemporary Music this fall, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of self-produced CDs being made with absolutely no label backing. At most, a band/artist will hire a company to promote their music, but there really is no need for the service that labels provide anymore. Recording costs have gotten so cheap that if you can afford a MacBook, you can make an album. There's no reason to sign a contract that forces you into five or six figures' worth of debt that you may never be able to pay back.
I see us moving from a model of music distribution based on mass production, the inheritance of 100+ years of mechanically-reproduced media, to a service-oriented one via digital distribution. And there's no reason to limit this concept to music. It applies equally to film and other audiovisual media. We're already used to this model via services like Netflix, Spotify, and Rhapsody. Even good old cable TV is essentially a service model, albeit a more old-fashioned one.
But even Netflix et al. are not going far enough for me. What I see in our future is a lot more fragmentation. We've already gotten to the point where it's impossible to keep up on every aspect of popular culture because it's superabundant. The sheer volume of new works being produced is overwhelming. If you love film and that's your favorite passion, I bet you don't know as much about the current music scenes, and vice versa. And you can't even keep up with everything new in your favorite medium. You'll have to pick a genre or a style to focus on, and even then you might not be able to watch/hear/read everything. The only thing holding us together enough to have any kind of relatable conversation about culture right now is that we're still relying on a lot of the old-model media corporations, for the creation of new works if not for their distribution. If/when those conglomerates finally die out, we'll have nothing left but a network of independent artists promoting themselves. It'll be interesting to see what the impact of that will be on society (assuming it does happen).
We've been living with a shared popular culture for so long that we forget it really hasn't existed for very long. In fact, it's largely a 20th century phenomenon. I can envision a time where culture becomes almost entirely a local thing as it once was. Except that with the internet, the whole idea of "local" could be transformed. Local might just be whatever you and your friends happen to glom onto. Or art could just become another service like personal trainers and psychiatrists. You might hear a song or somebody might refer you and you pay the artist to write and record more songs for you. It could even be collaborative, depending on the temperament of the artist and how demanding you are.
I would imagine this might be worrying to many consumers of pop culture who are used to the way things work now. But I think a lot of visual artists and composers of classical music are already used to being commissioned or given grants. I can't see any reason why the same thing couldn't work on a smaller scale with indie musicians and their laptops.
Perhaps eventually we'll just pay artists to create something for us and we'll be free to do whatever we want with it - copy it, give it to our friends, even claim we wrote it ourselves if we want to be assholes like that. The whole concept of copyright isn't terribly relevant if the artist gets paid directly upfront for creating a work. Won't some people make careers by ripping off other artists? Yes, but that's already happened. Besides, think about the alternative (i.e. the current reality) - the copyright term is extended beyond all reason just so a huge company (*cough* Disney *cough*) can continue to profit off of a cartoon mouse that a dead guy thought up almost a hundred years ago. Does that really seem better to you?
Copyright was never intended to be abused in such a manner. Like all intellectual property laws, copyright is meant to encourage and reward innovation in our society. The idea is that if you protect the ideas of artists and inventors, they will be able to make a living from continuing to create more and more ideas. Thus both artist and society directly benefit. Well, if I have one or two good ideas that make me rich and I know that the copyright will never expire, and that my grandchildren will still be collecting royalties off of what I did, how does that encourage me to create anything else? (By the way, it also rewards my lineage just for being born. It's basically creating a new class of IP royalty.)
Of course, the reality is more complex than this. Creative people will often be creative no matter what. However, when corporations own intellectual property, therein lies a bigger problem. It's no longer a matter of rewarding an individual for his or her contribution to society or culture. It's allowing a corporation to continue to profit off of someone's creativity in perpetuity (every time the copyright term is about to expire, they just hire lobbyists to convince Congress to extend the term another 20 or 50 years). Large for-profit corporations are inherently conservative entities. Why would they take a risk on something new when they can simply keep making money off the same thing that's always worked for them? It's entirely possible (and I think inevitable) for copyright, having been stretched unduly way past its originally intended limits, to have the opposite effect it was intended to have: that is, it can impede progress, slow the flow of new ideas into common culture, stifle creativity.
