Dave,

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. And I don’t really know much about the Pandora issue specifically, and agree that prices falsely set by a regulatory board (as what appears to be happening here) do not really represent the marketplace in action. (I knew Pandora sounded familiar, apparently I posted about it in December 2005, though I must have quickly lost interest in it as I don’t recall it.)

However, this is a deep and complex issue, and while I’m certainly no expert in it, allow me to offer a little pushback in the discussion.

In your original post, you wrote, “Information wants and needs to be free.” But in this comment you wrote that Pandora “also worked to the artists favor by pointing users to Amazon and iTunes.” So, I’m confused: does information want to be free, or does information only want to be paid for through certain approved channels?

I’m not just being snarky — even Pandora isn’t asking for free music, they are objecting to a doubling of the fee that they already pay. And perhaps they have a good point. But the point does not have to do with free intellectual property, only how much one is supposed to pay for it.

I too used to have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction against all the RIAA legal actions, and I think that the failure of major content companies to embrace digital distribution earlier has hurt them. But notice I say digital distribution — not free content. There is a difference.

Creative Commons is an interesting concept, but it is useless from a commerce perspective unless one is using the information distributed under that license to sell something else. Seth Godin can give away a few books as marketing gimmicks because he has many other books available for sale. But not everyone is Seth Godin. What if you don’t want to sell something else? What if you just want to write and sell a book? At some point, if one is to be able to produce quality content of any kind, money must exchange hands, and it has to be enough money (or the potential of enough money) to provide incentive for doing it, just like anything else.

I’m reminded of that horrible Xerox commercial from several years ago where the sloppy student tells the uppity professor, “Today, anyone can get published!” I shuddered everytime I heard it because I could only imagine the crap that most people would produce. Sure, now anyone can publish anything, but that doesn’t mean they can get readers — and the ones who don’t produce crap, who produce good stuff that certain segments want to read — are we making it impossible for them to make a living doing so?

In your comment you wrote, “Don??t associations make their money by capitalizing on the intellectual capital of their members and in exchange provide them with learning and networking opportunities along with the medium to accomplish these ends?” Perhaps some do; but they also own the intellectual property and sell it. Others of us hire specific people to create specific things that we own and sell. Though I must admit I am horrified at the idea of associations serving only to offer “learning and networking opportunities.” If associations aren’t selling something besides membership and “networking” then they will never be able to have much of an impact on their space.

I know I’ve sort of rambled on here — but this is a topic that needs further exploration. While one could argue that commercial content has produced a lot of schlock, I am afraid of a future that totally divorces content from commerce. And I do not think information wants to be free — I think there are some people who believe they shouldn’t have to pay for it. (And also, it seems from reading these articles that Pandora has chosen a bad business model and I’m not sure why they should be supported in doing so; if the system is so awesome, then why not charge 7 bucks a month for it?)