Information Doesn't Want to be Free
In a recent blog post, Michael Arrington claims that the lack of a marginal cost for a digital copy of a song implies that the cost of music will inevitably fall to nothing. (He has a longer discussion here.) This flies in the face of our years of experience with software, which can also be copied without marginal cost but has not become free. Not only has software produced one of the world's largest companies, but there are countless people who pay the $25 or so for the programs that keep many independent software companies in business. Apple has sold over 3 billion songs on iTunes - and these are mostly DRM'ed copies of tracks that their purchasers were presumably capable of finding free and unrestricted on peer-to-peer networks. We don't just value things because they are expensive to reproduce, and we won't stop buying them just because the medium of the distribution has changed. Besides, when you can pay $4 for a coffee, $1 / song can feel like almost nothing.