• Musicians can sell or give away music.
• Producers of copies can sell or give away copies.

The market for digital copies in a given work rapidly saturates (proportional to its popularity, sometimes within a day or less), therefore the market for the mass production of digital copies is as dead as Monty Python’s parrot. If you’re a producer of digital copies I don’t see a particularly rosy future. There may be a market niche for a producer of vinyl LP copies, but only while the nostalgia lasts.

However, the market for music is looking very good for music lovers because of how much easier it is for musicians to enter the marketplace and promote their music.

Control over distribution channels is dissipating and the selection of musicians for our consideration is no longer in the hands of a few record labels, via their retail and broadcast channels.

With more musicians and music lovers in the marketplace, there may well be more money available, but then this may be spread more thinly given so many more musicians. This is good for cultural diversity, but not so good if a few good musicians were hoping to corner the market and live in luxury.

Our key tasks in these times are:

1. Enabling musicians to sell their music to their audience (their market), whether live performances or studio recordings.
2. Restoring a free market in music by ending the highly unethical cultural constraint applying to all artists and their audiences, by abolishing the anachronistic and now ineffective monopoly of copyright.

We should be able to get at least one of those sorted before breakfast, eh?