While I’m not as revolutionary as Crosbie (although, stepping back into “consensus reality” it’s a hair split of a difference between me and him) it does seem that taking something away as fundamental as charging per “copy” would be wrenching under the most visionary, forward thinking authority.

Meanwhile, the death of “my favorite band” seems to me a cultural phenom almost separate from sue-em-all and more a by product of other forces. Kids don’t seem to pin their parental-anxieties on celebrity rocks stars like they did in past generations. I don’t mourn that.

As I tried to express in my comment on the other post in this thread: http://gonze.com/blog/2008/11/08/bitching-about-sue-em-all-for-newbies/ I think it’s an exceedingly gloomy time in the world of music. The industry simultaneously killed off both web-based innovation and its own economic prospects. However, as you’ve been pointing out recently, people do keep creeping forward. Whether it’s the net labels scrounging together some form of tribal identity for online music producers or the interactive music games inspiring new people to become makers themselves (have you played with r2dj or Bloom?) new incremental changes do keep coming along.

It’s kind of like Dr. Bloodmoney or one of the other good Phil Dick post-apocalyptic novels: most of civilization may have been destroyed, but some industrious tinkerer out there can probably put together a wood-burning car, the kindly kid in the radio shop turns out to be telekenetic, and the small rodents evolve high intelligence.

On my optimistic days, I find this state of affairs exciting and stimulating — you never know what weird creature could come along mext — but just as often it seems dreary and near hopeless: there is, after all, a lot to mourn for.

Something you and I have in common is a belief that where things are going is going to be reached by iterative improvements to web music, making the web hospitable to music and vice versa. But I don’t think a lot of people share that, or even have a conception of what it means.

You may be right that this way of thinking is over the heads of the people currently helming the iceberg-ramming fleet known as the record industry. On the other hand, the Boing Boing/Creative Commons/Twitter/Flickr/Social Media crowd finds it is so native as to be boring and cliche. Tonight, I went to Ignite Portland 4, a local in-person gathering of the digital tribes and I bet the people there would find the shortsighted “return on investment” logic that lead to “sue ‘em all” just as non-sensical as the record industry types find my talk of “network effects”.

The real questions are: how did these two groups get so far apart from each other and what can we do to bring them back together? A more partisan way of putting it might be: who’s right? Which of these ways of thinking is leading to more economic advantage and more social influence?