The comparison is only partially true. Musician is not like a code developer. He brings something original, like an algorithm that is new and original and it has, as a parallel, an intellectual property to it. So you pay for patents not by TIME invested in writing them or in building the instrument described there. Same with music - public do not pay for your TIME but for something else that the music brings.

Free downloads, legal or not, can build value or destroy it. Having equity to a song is something I was wondering about for long time. I think it means that people value it beyond random listening, want to repeat it, follow the artist, learn the technique, understand ideas, get into the artist's head... After all, music is a social phenomena and its market value is not proportional to time and effort spent in creating it. There must be lots of ways to monetize on "free" music, such as becoming an authority, a teacher, finding a patron. The problem is that no one teaches that in music academy, and we as artists think of our music as labor of love, not business.