Plus this apparently timeless bit of idiocy:  

But in the digital realm, there is no shelf space. ... A record company doesn't have to depend on one album to rack up sales of 5 million. They can make the same money selling 500 copies of 10,000 different titles, or, for that matter, 5 copies of 1 million titles.  

If there's anybody who thinks shelf space is why major-label record companies don't sign millions of artists with single-digit audiences, I got a lot of soon-to-be-$5 downloads I'd be willing to sell you for just $4 each...

I'm not even sure I would call him smart.  

If a single climbed to $5, consumers couldn't complain that it costs too much, since they would be the ones driving up the price.  

How does that work, exactly? It's not like all the fans of Artist X make decisions collectively through some some of senate. I am frequently irritated by the actions of people who buy some of the same products I do.

I dunno...on the one hand I get why it's "creepy" but on the other - and selfishly, as a consumer primarily of unpopularish music - I kind of see the logic. Except that the remarks in the article's closing paragraph are almost certainly true: why pay $5 for Britney's or whoever's latest la-la-crap when you can download it for free? And people who are only into chart tracks are probably least likely to be invested in artists' careers, and the notion that their downloading might hurt artists (of course, they're right: show me the chart artist who's broke now because of downloading, and I'll show you a popular bridge in an NYC borough that I'd like to sell you - so long as you pay for shipping to the valuable Florida swampland that you'll need the bridge to cross). Which is another way of saying no way will the record companies go for it. Especially since as structured, there's a strong disincentive to even bother making obscure tracks available. I think people forget that mp3s (or whatever Apple's proprietary format is) don't just create themselves: someone needs to make them from the tracks (or push the right buttons to do so: whatever).

Yuck. That's the kind of idea you get from a smart person wasting time they could have spent on something useful. I'd rather have .99/track than a creepy commodities market.  

My friend Mike and I were just discussing the Ecologist magazine essay-contest to identify humanity's worst invention. My instinctive nomination was money.

glenn,  

In light of your previous comments on digital music and on the stock exchange, I was wondering what your thoughts were on this model for digital music distribution that Adam Peneberg outlines over at Slate. Essentially, it's a music commodity exchange.  

www.slate.com/id/2131573/?nav=tap3