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Well, until the 20th century, the modern way of funding science (by competitive grant proposals to funding agencies) didn't exist. Scientists were to a large part just doing it for love of the subject as being a professional scientist just wasn't a thing. At best they could get a job as a professor, but that literally meant teaching back then; if they wanted to do research, they had it do it on their own and pay for it themselves. And the best scientists of the era like Darwin and Lord Rayleigh were from the idle rich who never needed a paying job at all so they could devote themselves full time to science. It didn't work that badly -- except of course that the number of scientists was tiny compared to now.

You could apply this argument to almost literally anything that people do or have done for money.

Yes, there is a reason nobody is making money selling NPM modules and that is the marginal cost is zero and there is no constraint on supply, people like to do it for free.

Doctors and Lawyers have professional guilds that legislate to constrain supply. Hence the price is high.

Competence doesn't really come into it, even in the high art world it's more about who you know than what you know. No amount of wishful thinking will change this.

Isn't this a natural way that scarcity comes back. If everything thar is produced is unsatisfying then someone will be willing to pay more to get something better. When someone finds a good way to sell that premium model then others will try to imitate it and after a while the value will drop again until someone finds the next way to do increase the value and so on and so forth.

Arguably the equivalent work that artists can do as compared to what other professionals can do is to have their work commissioned for some other project. You know, jingles, soundtracks, creating atmosphere (i.e. live performances), that kind of thing.

I guess what I'm saying is that following the state of typical labour markets, having somebody produce something that they have their name on, that is an artistic work of its own right and actually getting paid for it is actually pretty extraordinary. Only a very tiny fraction of people get to work that way (probably because of the limits of attention as much as anything else). In many respects it's not surprising that it's fragile.

While I don't disagree that it would turn out to be bad for music to lose its professional art for art's sake, I also don't think the comparison with other professionals holds.

> It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour.

I suspect the "bad" argument is actually compatible with division of talent and labour. Could you explain the link between this division and income?

> You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers. > So why is it fine to apply it to an art?

Because history shows us that "some" art gets done, even when no money is directly involved. And actually, it's the same for physicists, engineers, sports, software developers - not sure about lawyers, policitans, or financial experts.

Now we have to ask ourselves: for all these domains, what's an acceptable amount for "some"?

People are not pirating "some" art, the generally pirate the best art available.

The best art has always been produced by professionals and not by some YouTube narcissists who think they're God's gift to this world.

As a rule, people are pirating the most valuable art, not the best. This is an important distinction, because by conflating them, you are buying into the industry's point that the most expensive art is the best -- and as the monopoly cartel controls the price, that becomes self-fulfilling.

It is true that in pop music and movies the best art does not necessarily win, but even bad movies have some level of professionalism that is absent from indie productions.

YouTube becomes the cartel these days, and tries to drive down the price for "content" to zero.

It is far more evil for artists than any middleman taking 60% or more of a substantial sum of money.

There are pirates who are in it to make money, and pirates who are in it to get the art itself. The former might focus on most valuable art, the latter focus mostly on art that is the best - they're not going to pirate something they don't like (I'm purposefully not taking into account things like downloading that horrible Celine Dion album for dear old mumsy. :) )

> It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour. You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians, financial experts, sports, or software developers.

The key point you're missing is these people are selling their labor (aside, maybe, from software developers who could be selling their product).

If you get an engineer to design a bridge they do the work and get paid, no IP rights, no "limited" monopoly, no nothing but a paycheck.

If you get a musician to write a song for you they (and their heirs) get payed for that work for a long, long time.

I understand where you're coming from (that artists should be a protected class so we have "enough" artists) but the days of the billionaire rockstar is probably over.

>The predictable outcome is that you'll get mediocre unsatisfying art that leaves everyone involved feeling like something vital is missing - which is more or less where we are no

On the other hand, modern, professionally produced, top-10, high grossing music, from the few millionaire "division of labor" artists, also leaves me "feeling like something vital is missing", so there's that...

>You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians, financial experts, sports, or software developers.

I would, probably.

Sports were better when it was amateurs, and scientists were better, more independent, and less corrupt, when they were independently wealthy people or at least tenured academics... (80% of modern science and technology that changed the world came from those people -- for the last 50 years or so, we just got incremental, evolutionary, updates in the 20% rest of the rest).