10 cc's of Reality, Stat!

I've been paying attention to a discussion, involving several blogs and their comment threads, of the ongoing death-spasms of the recording industry, the feasibility of micropayments, and verious peripheral issues. Read here first, and then Daniel Davies's follow-up post (one of the commenters in that thread) here. In Davies's words:

"The issue of 'whither the music industry in a world of reduced intellectual property' is bound to bring out a lot of interesting opinions; I think this is because a) we don’t know what the heck will happen b) we’d all like to believe that the answer will involve us all owning loads and loads of fantastic music for next to no cost but c) we all suspect that it probably won’t."

I think that's exactly right. I've long since given up being enthusiastic about the soon-to-arrive dawn of the Incredibly Cheap Music Era, because it seems to me what most people are really trying to get at is some modified version of the "Information wants to be free" spiel, which I find utterly unconvincing to begin with. They say that death and taxes are the only two certainties in life, but I think there's a third: that given X that someone or some group wants, some other person will figure out a way to make money on it. There will never be a time when music is free, and the sooner we realize this, the better off we're all going to be.