You mean like this? http://goo.gl/8D3LH

So, what made us think we needed rich recording artists? I look at the radio-dominated years, when quality music had to be paid for, and think of how much I missed. Your great-grandparents got their music for free, and most of them knew the musicians personally. Read here for a description of how much we lost when industrialized music dsitribution came into being. To summarize:

- Music was distributed from one person to the next (by word of mouth), completely uncontrolled and decentralized.
- Everyone heard LIVE performances several times a month for free.
- Rich performing artists were virtually nonexistent.

Sounds like the MP3-future, right? But that was THEN.

We all know what the recording industry brought us -- popular classical supplanted folk, and then many other even more technically elaborate musical styles ensued (ragtime, jazz, etc. right up to today's techno and conscious hip hop). Most people today believe that more and better music was available to Americans in the 1970's than in the 1870's. But they lost their folk art too, and live performance became a very rare treat. Music became something you had to pay for, or endure the voiceover chatter and advertisements of the radio.

So what? Well, think about it -- if things keep going the way they are, we'll return to an economy in which massively rich artists are very rare or nonexistent. Music will once again be passed along from one person to the next. It's really closer to our roots as a human race, if you think about it. The best creative musicians will be those who, like Mozart and Beethoven, live and die for their art and nothing else. And of course, we'll retain the technological convenience of not having to perform music ourselves. Beyond that -- imagine a personal DJ that takes your requests and automatically figures out what you'd most like to hear next.

Sounds pretty good to me.