Copyright: Featured Artists' Coalition
I know this is not a particularly fashionable point of view but unless we want our arts to be sponsored by the state as in the former Soviet Union the folk who produce and present them to the public need to be paid. Maybe not as much as they used to be before the digital age and probably not as much as they would like, but certainly enough to make it worth their while getting up in the morning. Those folk include not just the recording companies who have made a lot of fuss and have made themselves unpopular by suing file sharers but artists, particularly those who are trying to establish themselves. Now I am normally suspicious of pressure groups. As Adam Smith put it “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” But because of the dramatic changes to the economics of the entertainment industry brought about by digitization - namely the facili...