Livre d'Or

Interesting article, thanks for pointing to that. I don't entirely agree; when anyone starts claiming that we don't need publishers any more since it costs nothing to make a digital file, I tend to discount their argument. I don't want to listen to (or read) any old self-published crap for free, I want to pay for good quality, properly selected and edited and produced content, and I'm sure I'm not unique in this preference. But that aside, some really interesting perspectives in there.

It is, partly, about persuading people pay for something that costs nothing to make. For my part, I'm willing to pay for the curation which makes available good, original stuff rather than having to find my own way through mounds and mounds of talentless derivative crap. (Yes, Sturgeon's law applies, and much of published music is crap, but not as crap as it would be if you had to sort out the actual music from everything that people felt like uploading to the internet.) And for the time and technology it takes to make a good quality recording.

I think a lot of people aren't really aware of those things, or don't think of them as something worth paying for, which seems to be the attitude in that article. But it's still worth money to have the convenience of a nice, searchable online store which provides some customer service rather than having to go trawling about the dodgy bits of the internet searching for pirate versions of what I want. And that's without even considering the moral issue of actively wanting to compensate the creators of music I like.