The issue with Home Depot is that if I buy a dishwasher from there, I get one dishwasher. If I give that dishwasher away, I have no dishwasher. With online content, that doesn't hold. If I give away a copy of an article I just read in the New York Times, I still have a copy.
It goes even further than that. Content I can share with my friends is MORE valuable than content I keep all to myself, in some cases. (Paywalls are most successful where that isn't true -- where there's some advantage to having information that other people don't.)
What do you mean by "better" or "worse"? Music is certainly alive and well and I am absolutely spoiled for choice. My musician/dj/producer friends are all busy, happy people.
The recording industry's "good old days" were mostly before my time but producer and musician Steve Albini, who was around back then, called the record industry out in 1993 in an essay succinctly titled The Problem With Musichttp://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17
An excerpt:
In contrast to what almost anyone else will tell you, Albini believes there has never been a better time to be involved in music – as a fan and as a musician (excluding, perhaps, the megastars): “I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies.
“I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small, most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.”
Yes I would agree it has never been a better time! I was just asking to see if home taping really did affect it like people believe.
For one thing, the quality of recording interfaces and the accessibility of such hardware is really really great at the moment. I play in a few bands and being able to record practices in clear quality and listen back to them would have been unheard of 15 years ago.
As for the quality of that music, that's entirely subjective.
I was around for Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye, and your comparison is biased. You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y.
When looking backwards, you have an especial temptation to compare whatever is popular right-this-instant to whatever from back then has stood the test of time, even if it wasn’t the most popular thing in the world.
I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally.
But the "mainstreamity" (connecting a society and being a central cultural focus) is also a desirable attribute from music (from art in general), that is lacking today.
That is, there's music that's great but not mainstream and music that's mainstream but not great. The sixties and seventies (up to the nineties maybe) had both.
Modern good music has lost that, and everyone listens to good or even excellent music oblivious on his own little world and niche.
(Oh, and I'm not waxing because I'm some Beatles-loving older guy -- I'm much younger and in fact I listen to tons of new music most people wouldn't even touch, from Nobukazu Takemura to Mount Erie, Four Tet, etc.).
For me it's like great modern music is like some excellent Social Media site, with tons of features, great layout, speedy backends, nice UI et al, but where there are very few people using it. Yeah, in itself it might be a great web app, but where's the conversation and the social aspect?
Obviously, copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP for this model to work. But that is as separate issue which is not mitigated by the ad-supported model. E.g. there are whole sites devoted to blatantly ripping off content from NY Times, WSJ, etc. and slapping their own ads on top.
It's not about being able to control the distribution of their IP, it's that allowing users to redistribute their IP makes that IP more valuable for users. This isn't a universal truth of all content, but it's certainly a truth for stuff like news articles. Look at this very website. It's premised around sharing articles, blog posts, and such and allowing users to add their own commentary and see what others think about the same article. Every time a paywalled article comes up on the front page Hacker News, half the posts in the first 10 minutes are about how to get around the paywall or complaints about the paywall.
The point is, for a user of Hacker News, an article he or she can post on this site and share with other HN users is simply more valuable than an article he or she cannot. And that's not just a local phenomenon, it's part of Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other smaller (sometimes ad hoc) online communities.
Its a deeply interrelated issue. Personally, "copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP" is far more frightening to hear to me than anything about ads. Every "advancement" made for IP holders is usually incredibly customer hostile. We've seen international trade deals over this issue, we've seen fundamental rights degraded over this issue. I personally would prefer it not boil down to legal means of ensuring content owners get their content not ripped off (a last resort that rarely works), as opposed to a natural solution where the distribution method matches the natural inclinations of the users (people generally DON'T feel bad about stealing "content", but DO feel bad about stealing washing machines).
For the record, ads existed before the internet too. Remember the radio? Remember PHYSICAL newspapers. Remember TV? Its kind of nice that the lower economic stratus of society has SOME access to all these services without being blocked by a paywall. In a paywall world, you walk into a library to use the internet because you don't have a computer, then are turned away from every site because you also don't have a credit card.
Ok with your first paragraph and free TV with ads predates the Internet, ok. But free newspapers with ads are a 2000's invention, at least in my part of the world. Newspapers used to be protected by a paywall, currently some hundreds of Euro per year. Problem is: people usually read only one physical newspaper so even one Euro per day would be ok, but they read articles on random websites linked by Google News. Either you micro-pay each article (0.01?) or you won't afford news anymore, unless you read them on only one website again.
Maybe that kind of world would be great for aggregators. Think Flipboard. They could buy content from newspapers and resell it with a subscription. That would work for Blogger and Wordpress.com too: pay for access to all the blogs on the site. Maybe this is the first step of an Apple's strategy to become a news/blog aggregator. Damage the competition and take over.
It goes even further than that. Content I can share with my friends is MORE valuable than content I keep all to myself, in some cases. (Paywalls are most successful where that isn't true -- where there's some advantage to having information that other people don't.)