I’ve now read Paul’s response several times and I’m having a hard time parsing. Hopefully someone can clarify:

This:

“With lower discrimination the same money might well be spread more thinly.”

seem to imply to me that at least music that is less in-demand will at least see *some* revenue

But then this:

“The owners of the ‘must have’ tracks will be able to exploit this and thus indirectly drive down compensation for the rest of the market.”

Drive down from zero? Isn’t some revenue better than none?

“2. The web does not require frictionless transactions – as anyone who tries to look at people on MySpace or Facebook without logging in can tell you. Minimal necessary friction does seem to be a reasonable strategy”

I thought Lucas addressed this by saying that accessing music is already high friction activity – certainly more than a one time registration and login to browse pages in social network… no?

“The reason we have been able to do this is the high value that a reasonable proportion of people place on music”

Is this suggesting that some portion of the population would, say, pay a subscription fee for zero-friction access to some otherwise restricted pool of music?

I guess I still don’t get why the questions are even framed in terms of how to save the major labels’ businesses. It just seems like the core of the business model that’s left after you strip away the CD-distribution-hegemony is hardly worth the effort.