Lose, lose IMO.
The easiest part to dismantle is the part about the "lots of bands struggling to make money".
I am a semi professionnal musician, and as such i also know a lot of "bands struggling to make money" guys. There are already a plenty. Maybe 99,50 % of the musicians are struggling to make money, and it has been like that since a very long time.
And guess what, some of them make it and succesfully make a living out of it, and NONE of them depend on royalties to do so, because technically when you're a struggling musician you make approximately 90% of your income on gigs and 10% on publishing your music. And i'm being generous here. Much more often, and it has been like that since the beginning of indie production, bands invest money into producing their CD, and they never make a net income on it. Except it's still interresting to do it, for the promotion of the band. On the last year, with my band, we made approximately 25.000 € on gigs, and a whopping 800 € on vinyl/Cd releases.
The consequence of that is that musicians that make a substantial income in royalties doesn't need them to live/survive because when you're up to that point you also earn way enough money to survive with your live performances.
A lots of recent studies shows that people are definately not buying less music than before, and on the other hand getting it for free has never been so easy. Also the www and P2P has been fantastic opportunities to musicians insofar, to promote themselves and sell/give away their music, and hence get a much bigger audience than they had before, without needing to go through the very tight and controlled channel of major record companies.
You see a potential decrease in quality ? As a musican i see a very net increase. Making music and broadcasting it has never been so easy.
The movies industry is a different matter. Production prices are way higher, and potentially you could see it be much more impacted by the P2P sharing. For a simple reason : Movie makers need their movie industry. Musicians don't, at least they don't need it for broadcasting and producing anymore.
Also what I actually said was: > a decline in published music quality
Music will have to be published on the cheap = bad quality. Yes there will be lots of great music online (there already is) but no one will sieze it and market in the same way. In the future I think there will be lots of user-centric acts who get little coverage outside their sites and genre's.
So this is the thing: your pitching promotion on a free-ish model potentially awash with thousands of good artists. It could be argued a large percentage of the gig attendance was from people who listened to your CD's - and again it's not a huge stretch to say that in many cases they were driven to the CD by advertising (especially for bands who are relativewly "unknown") - by advertising I include radio plays (which are often prompted by press releases etc.) and other hype. It is in the interest of the producers to sell the CD's so they invest in marketing the bands. In a free model there isnt any point in marketing the band - so the vast majority will never achieve the critical mass to make live gigs worthwhile.
I could well be wrong - but then again I think it's more a case of a "bit of both". I suspect we will see a decline in large music publishers, and will see a lot less "global bands".
So yes it was an emotional reaction (it's hot and the office has 20 computers in it compounding the issue :D) Im just somewhat fed up of the many people who keep bemoaning the media industry despite huge leaps forwards in the last 18 months - it's getting their slowly but is constantly hampered (as I see it) by those who just want something for nothing (and argument I just havent had sold to me yet :P).
Im not saying a free model cannot work (im sure it can). I just argue that some of the main exponents of the model consider it their right to access media for free on their terms - again something I personally strongly disagree with. Copyright is broken: but no protection at all? That's just wrong IMO.
> In a free model there isnt any point in marketing the band
Why do you think this is the way, i would have said, quite on the opposite side , that promotion is the beginning and end of the free model, to make the only substantial income you have (gigs) worthwile.
Also, the reason i see this in a positive way is because, i personnally have very little esteem for the actual beholders of the music market, wich in my opinion, has a very conservative way of gauging the quality of music.
In fact, as releasing Cds is very expensive, and as we're talking about often multi-billion dollars companies, you see a phenomenon wich reminds me of the videogames industry, in wich you'll settle on very well known recipes that are proven to work. The amount of innovative stuff that reaches the mainstream is very very low. You could say that it is, by definition, but i would argue, and that's very subjective, that even some of the hits of the 80s wouldn't have been released by todays Record Companies standards , wich has never been so conservative.
Especially in artistic matters, quality can't only be gauged by the amount of stuff you're gonna sell, and even if it's a criteria, it shouldn't be the only one IMO. The generalization of music sharing on computers allows the growth of a much more liberal ecosystem here, and i think it's really for the better !
The question of wether people should be 'allowed' to think about music as a free thing, (in short , morally abbrogate copyright) isn't clear to me. Intellectual Property is one of the biggest foundation of today's economy. Questionning it is scary. I don't know if it should disappear in artistic matters, but i surely think it's a question we have to debate today.
We have a very important position in this, as the Open Source 'movement' is maybe the precursor of such conceptual trends. I think we owe to ourselves and to our peers, as hackers, to ask ourselves, and to question the facts deeply about these matters.