Aside from the personal attacks, you are attempting here to make an intellectual construct: ‘product’ as ‘legalized monopoly’ or, equally pejoratively, a ‘deliberate fiction’.
Your construct is used to deny value to a previously physical good that no longer requires a physical medium. As you put it: “But once the physical component of media became something that folks on the buy side already owned our controlled outright (i.e. disk space, bandwidth, and electricity), the fiction became unsustainable.”
In other words, unless something is a physical product it no longer has a defensible value.
So - taking your point - let’s agree that music isn’t a physical product at all. Of course, any piece of music starts it’s life as an idea anyway. Let’s consider music as a service - an entertainment service rendered by the artist onto anyone who chooses to listen. This is an ‘intellectual’ service provided much along the same lines as a lawyer or journalist or any thought-based medium. The main inputs are only the great intangibles of time and expertise.
Now, your original view invalidating the value of non-physical goods demands that any thought-based products do not deserve compensation or protection in your system. After all, there value is just ‘deliberate fiction’. The legal profession, of course, is just a ‘legalized monopoly’ complete with barriers to entry such as law school and the Bar Exam. Journalism - built on the back of intangibles of integrity, connections, and honesty - is just an ‘unsustainable fiction’.
Let’s put a bold line under it: this world-view dismisses the value of non-physical-product producing work. This sounds quite like Maoist China to me. You accuse me of peddling ‘utterly obsolete’ ideas but your line of thought is gravely far from being progressive. It is actually very retrograde and, in my opinion, anti-individual.
Work. Time. Expertise. All intangibles. Either they have value in society and deserve recompense or they don’t. It’s yes or it’s no. To avoid a long deliberation on the difference between lawyers and artists let's make it simple: if one derives something desired from the work of others than it is worthy of recompense for, logically, all that is desired has value. The inputs truly don’t matter. The medium of transference certainly doesn’t.
From where I am standing it is your thought so far that is actually the ‘deliberate fiction’: a mental construct dissolving value. A belief that through some McGuffin-like process of ‘digitalization’ the natural rules of civil society no longer apply. These are not top-down pronouncements from a single man or a government; they are bottom-up flexible norms derived from millennia of very real human experience across thousands of cultures comprised by millions of people.
That for me is the ultimate irony and hubris: to think that one’s simple fiction somehow displaces the truth of human society. I am all for transformation but the sad news for some people seems to be that the virtual world of the internet is but a derivative of the real world - not a replacement for it. If you want to build a better internet, build one that can re-purpose human interaction in a positive way. If you only want to consume the internet simply claim that that re-purposing has no basis for being done.
So which is it? I believe that artists deserve at least a period of recompense for their works. What do you believe?