To me, this is a very fundamental disagreement, but in no way acrimonious ;-)
As you say . who knows whether music or anything else will be better or worse. No-one can say. The only thing one can say is that it will be different.
I was just reading a report today about Finnish cinemas. There were only 6 copies of 'The Queen' circulating: which means it gets to rural areas (at worst) 4- 6 months later, by which time the DVD is out. There is no chance in this monoculture for biodiversity.
Do we accept the monoculture with a very small niche for 'other' creativity, or do we reject the monoculture and accept the specialization of biodiversity and reinforce the idea of robustness?
IMO the lesson of Nature tells us that mongrelization leads to robustness and invigoration. And there is a timescale to that. Just as the product of cross fertiliztion may skip a generation, so the product of musical cross fertilization may take two generations - with a lot of creative people suffering in between. The 'failure' of the in-between generation does not condemn the process. Time will tell. You can't be me, I'm taken
It has happened many times before.
The end of our dependence on oil products doesn't have to be calamitious. We just have to argue about the value of happiness and what that means, rather than protecting 'jobs' that are no longer needed. Creativity will alway be needed - but of what kind? You can't be me, I'm taken
I'm not the one who thinks that just because a creative work can be reduced to a digital file it's as valuable - or not - as every other digital file of equivalent length.
As for monocultures - that's a different issue again. I'll be the first to agree that corporate media monoculture is a bad thing. But the IP people's solution is more likely to create an even worse monoculture than solve the problem.
You create diversity by supporting talent. If you don't support talent - which is something that neither the corporates nor the IP people seem keen on - you don't get diversity.
Effectively I don't see a distinction between Pirate Bay and Microsoft on this issue. Neither has any interest in supporting art, and there's absolutely no evidence that either has ever made any effort to do so - nor ever will.
The point is that hardly anyone cares about content any more for its own sake. What's fashionable at the moment is a rather superficial vogure for creating markets for their own sake.
eBay, MySpace, YouTube, mp3.com (as was), PirateBay, Demonoid, and all the rest are all more interested in the process of bartering attention than in the content that's being exchanged.
Some people might find this exciting. I think it's creepy, because it means the capitalists have won - everything is a market now, and the highest possible value is either trading stuff, or stealing it.
The situation is almost exactly analogous to peak oil. In the same way that the physical world is considered an externality, the process of creativity is considered external to these markets.
But like the real world, it's a limited resource. It's quite a bit more sustainable than oil is, but that doesn't mean that if it's not nurtured it's not going to diminish into rather less than it has been for the last few hundred years.
