Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
The quote from Nilay Patel's Vox article hits on one of my pet peeves.<p>> Nilay Patel wrote in Vox:<p>> "Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. 'Music is art,' she says, 'and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.'<p>> This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.... On the internet, there’s no scarcity: there’s an endless amount of everything available to everyone.<p>How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital <i>copies of music</i>. Obviously these are two different things! If you tell your mom "I made a song" she will be quite unimpressed if what you actually mean is "I made a digital copy of a song." A book or a song or a movie is more than the bits that make up any individual copy of it.<p>There is a like-with-like comparison in there, but it actually hurts Patel's argument. There is no scarcity of music on the Internet--not referring to digital copies, but because the Internet has made it trivial to create and widely distribute original music (often for free). If consumers were unwilling to pay much for Swift's music because of the vast quantity of alternatives available on the Internet, Patel would indeed have a point. But consumers still want Swift's music, not other peoples' music. Even in the face of huge amounts of free alternatives, consumers still want Swift's music. That only proves Swift's point!