I have a question.

Here in this video, Sherman Alexie compares digital books to digital music, and says that now, all musicians need to make their money touring instead of by selling records:

Please correct me if I’m wrong here, musicians: most artists never see much money from their recordings. And they didn’t even long before the internet made wide-scale file sharing possible. Because they couldn’t recoup the costs of the recordings they made to their record labels. (Doug Wolk linked to this little post by a member of the band Too Much Joy recently. They still owe nearly $400,000 to Warner before they will ever see a penny of royalties.)

The analogy simply doesn’t hold. If you are making a principled stand based on a false analogy, what then?

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