You're talking about distribution cost and ignoring the cost in time (and lost opportunity to do something else) to the writers or musicians.
The price of a record was never just the cost of pressing the record. CDs cost pennies to burn; paper and digital printing by the late 20th century were extremely cheap. The wholesale and retail prices always included pay for the artist (along with a raft of agents and corporations along for the ride). Spotify itself imposes artificial costs to distributing music, in the form of limits, prohibiting downloads, subscriptions and advertising. They do this to make money for themselves, but also to pay the artists.
As you say, distribution is now essentially free from a technical standpoint. There's no philosophical difference between Spotify charging 100x what it costs them to stream a song, and a record company charging 20x what it cost to press a CD. Free distribution would mean zero money for artists. We started by talking about piracy. By definition, with piracy the artist gets nothing.
Since no one can sustain an artistic career and produce writing or music over a long period without some sort of income, this means either all artists will have to be from the wealthy classes, have other means of support, and simply want to make art as a hobby, or else there has to be a distribution channel with an imposed toll of some kind that ultimately funnels them payment for their work. Whether subscription-based, or charging per-device for copy protected media, that will never be a perfect system, will never be free of piracy, and will always appear to the end consumer as an arbitrary restriction on free information.
I don't think scarcity of paper has been the limiting factor on price since at least the 18th Century. Since there is no scarcity of electrons, I don't view scarcity as a useful paradigm. The prices of locked downloads are simply representing the actual cost and market value of the work, which should be the same whether on the paper or in the aether.
Distribution costs are the reason why record labels earned so much money - it provided friction to piracy, since copying a vinyl was as expensive (if not more) than buying a new one. That friction is no longer there, and such a model cannot work anymore. Perhaps the age of "rock stars" collecting rent for years is simply over. Why should artists be rewarded indefinitely for just one piece of work? Perhaps the very expectations are inflated due to the previous golden age.
Artists should be rewarded for their work - but artificially limiting everyone's ability to share information is not the right way to do it. It would have severe consequences for the free society.
Another way must be found. I don't have any ideas, but I know that restriction of sharing information is not a good one.
The price of a record was never just the cost of pressing the record. CDs cost pennies to burn; paper and digital printing by the late 20th century were extremely cheap. The wholesale and retail prices always included pay for the artist (along with a raft of agents and corporations along for the ride). Spotify itself imposes artificial costs to distributing music, in the form of limits, prohibiting downloads, subscriptions and advertising. They do this to make money for themselves, but also to pay the artists.
As you say, distribution is now essentially free from a technical standpoint. There's no philosophical difference between Spotify charging 100x what it costs them to stream a song, and a record company charging 20x what it cost to press a CD. Free distribution would mean zero money for artists. We started by talking about piracy. By definition, with piracy the artist gets nothing.
Since no one can sustain an artistic career and produce writing or music over a long period without some sort of income, this means either all artists will have to be from the wealthy classes, have other means of support, and simply want to make art as a hobby, or else there has to be a distribution channel with an imposed toll of some kind that ultimately funnels them payment for their work. Whether subscription-based, or charging per-device for copy protected media, that will never be a perfect system, will never be free of piracy, and will always appear to the end consumer as an arbitrary restriction on free information.
I don't think scarcity of paper has been the limiting factor on price since at least the 18th Century. Since there is no scarcity of electrons, I don't view scarcity as a useful paradigm. The prices of locked downloads are simply representing the actual cost and market value of the work, which should be the same whether on the paper or in the aether.