Bounty Markets for Open-Access eBooks. Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (2010-10-25):

From "go to hellman" Bounty Markets for Open-Access eBooks In January 1773, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart placed advertisements asking patrons to "subscribe" to the three piano concertos he was writing. If he received enough support, the concertos would be finished by April, and subscribers would receive beautifully copied manuscripts. More importantly,…

Q: Without intellectual protectionism to sustain a massive system of corporate marketing, record companies, and advances for artists, how will creators ever be able to support their work? In a freed market with freed copying and freed exchange, how would we ever marshal the resources we need to sustain a flourishing musical culture?

A: Let’s ask a minor musician of the past few centuries — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — how he did it.

A broken, top-heavy, capital-intensive business model in music has nothing to do with the needs of a flourishing free culture. It has everything to do with grants of monopoly privilege, by the state, to entrenched incumbent firms, and the systematic distortion and deformation of the whole network of musical commerce around the gravity-well of those coerced monopoly profits. The monopolists’ broken business model is not our problem, and should not be forced on the rest of us. Music will do fine without it — just ask Mozart.