[...]or maybe you are so used to preaching to the quire that you don't know what a real argument looks like.

@Brendan Miller:
I can’t imagine why Emil would preach to one twentieth of a ream of paper (a quire). Perhaps you should understand what you are saying before you speak. Just because someone offends you with their semantics doesn’t mean the article is invalid and should not be read. You call his argument childish, but I think it is actually your reaction which is far more childish. Emil was not preaching to the choir, he was simply making an appeal to the majority of his audience.

And that’s the challenge that the record industry should put all their power towards. Think of speakers instead of writers, how do they get money?

There’s the rub for the record companies (RIAA’s customers, so to speak). This path leads to more money for the artist, but the record company getting cut out or at least playing a much smaller role.
You no longer need millions of dollars worth of equipment to cut and mix music, just a computer and a special piece of software.
You no longer need to stamp out thousands of CDs and distribute them to record stores around the world. Just put the music on the web, offer to send a CD for a small fee, even allow higher quality music downloads (flac) for a small fee (uses more bandwidth).
The only thing the record company will be needed for, really, is promotion.

because you are blatantly appealing to my ego by suggesting that if I agree with you I have more “nerd cred”. Whatever…

That you think such childish rhetorical tactics will get by your reader makes me think you either have little respect for them, you don’t know any better, or maybe you are so used to preaching to the quire that you don’t know what a real argument looks like.

I did not read the rest of your article, nor do I intend to.

What is threatened is the “right” to make a life-long living out of a few years of creativity. The few artists that seems to complain a lot seems to be the great artists of the 80′s and early 90′s, while more recent artists are either embracing the Internet or are at least a lot less categorical.

Basically, the “making money from a distribution monopoly” are seriously threatened, and artists that have signed long-term contracts with such monopoloys might not like that. I don’t think other artists / authors / etc need to worry that much.

There will be people willing to pay for culture. Maybe the prices will do down a bit — maybe even by half — but that still leaves more money to the actual artist than the big-label system of today.

Newspapers have ads in them to finance their being – I’d hate to see that in books.

About paying authors: The fact is that the internet has made distribution dirt cheap. That means that everyone previously making money from distribution monopoly does have a problem. You’ve started to see newspapers with the same problem, without anyone going through hoops to find out how to pay them now when people find their news online instead.

An author’s performance is them writing a new book. That’s something they can do, and that’s what there’s demand for. If they “have to get paid” like you say (which is far from certain), I think that that’s where they should get their money. Again, any details of how it should work is actually not my problem, I can just describe how things have changed.

Usability can be a crime. Helping others commit a crime is illegal (i.e. making it easier for others to commit crimes).

The main difference between speaches and music/books is that speaches are usually only relevant around the time they are spoken.

And some musicians and all (well, a vast majority) authors don’t want to or cannot perform. So who should pay them while working or when they’ve finished their work? The only entity that possibly could pay is the government, but wouldn’t that put all those people under the same category, and all would be payed equally (without caring about who’s more “popular” or “better”).

So no, business model isn’t actually our problem, but if there actually doesn’t exist a good one (allowing free distribution) – then we’re back to the first step again.
(I guess I have such a business model though: Authors and musicians could start to include ads in their works. That on the other hand would be a catastrophy, so I hope not)