Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One could argue that the whole purpose of society is to get rid of scarcity. Scarcity of resources has nothing to do with scarcity of artistic works. Literature isn't fungible like a commodity, and can't be grown or mined as needed. It's also not a professional service or a form of labor. You can't put a gun to a farmer's head and make them write something brilliant, the way you can make them farm potatoes. One cou…
> One could just as easily argue that society exists to organize labor in a way that increases specialization and efficiency. The reduction of scarcity is just a side effect. If so, then what is the purpose of specialization and efficiency, if not for the reduction of scarcity, in terms of individual access to resources? If cooperation wasn't beneficial for the individual, nobody would cooperate (unless forced to do…
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.