"USE" music???
Listening isn't using for commercial gain, an employee doesn't give commercial gain by putting the radio on in the office so that argument is null and pointless. Even playing it in a shop doesn't actually give commercial gain but that slightly different.
Water is totally different, legally even if you don't pay your bill you will never be disconnected, its the only protected service everyone has access to despite being provided by private companies.
If you don't like people not paying the scam artists that are PRS/PPL don't put your music in the public domain. It will never be treated the same as other commodities and its completely unenforceable and unrealistic to think otherwise.
What you are saying is that goods and services that have zero marginal costs should be free.
There are many people who think that IP should be free. Music is IP. It is as much property as a patent, a logo, a film, a computer programme, or a picture and all have zero marginal costs. You may not like the idea, but IP of ANY sort just is somebody else's property and is not free!
But here's the kicker -
The music industry, despite all the glitz and glamour that it tries to generate, is about as close to complete bankruptcy as an entire industry can be. The only exception is live music and that position is being eroded by festivals and charity events that think they can beg free performances in exchange for exposure.
If you saw what musicians really earn, if you were able to look at the books of even some of the so-called top stars, you would be amazed. If you were to look at the returns for ordinary jobbing musicians, you would shake your head in disbelief. Many brilliant people earn absolutely nothing. The very little that they do earn is eaten away by having to pay for instruments, drive to gigs, etc.
What you and others want to get for free is a by-product of a passion that some people have to make music and share that creation with others.
Other people have other passions that they turn into useful careers, such as building houses, studying the law or planting crops. Just because somebody loves the process of building a house, you don't think that it is right to take that house from him for nothing. Just because a lawyer loves the intricacies of contract law, you would not expect him or her to draft a contract for you for free. Just because a farmer takes enormous pride in growing a field of strong and healthy wheat, hardly gives you the right to take some and give him nothing in return.
But in today's digital world, music has zero marginal cost, so it's OK to take it and give the musician nothing. At least, that is what some people think.
Going by that logic, software also has zero marginal cost and should be free. Films have zero marginal cost and should be free.
Going by the crazy logic of "Well, it didn't cost anything to produce, so why the hell should I pay for it!" we must take a fresh look at marginal costs altogether!
Cars have a marginal cost of about one eighth of RRP, so a new Mercedes should set you back £5,000 and no more. A VW Golf, brand spanking new, should cost just £2,500. After all, that's what it costs to build the damn thing, so why should I pay more?
"Ah! Now that's different!" you would say. "They have substantial development costs that run into hundreds of millions! They, the car companies, need a return on investment, otherwise they would not build any new cars and we would all be driving around in Austin A50 Cambridges!"
Bingo!
The same applies to the music business. It costs at least £50,000 to record a commercial CD. Most popular music costs a great deal more than that to record. Classical music is often off the scale. I was once in a London studio control room during an orchestral recording for a film and asked the studio manager what the place cost for one day. She told me £3,600, plus VAT and extras.
"That's nothing!" said the musical director. "That orchestra is costing us £82,000 a day."
But back to popular music - having recorded our great hit, we have to market the damn thing and that means making a video, sending out copies to programme managers and getting agents to hawk it round radio stations and getting it onto play-lists. For a single territory, such as the UK, that will typically cost about £250,000 or more. For the US, think in low millions. Now multiply by all the territories you want/need to hit.
Because of downloads and digital distribution that pays little or nothing, the labels (or what's left of them) hope to make back a large part of their investment through live gigs, except we now have cheap-skates like Glastonbury undermining what little is left, by paying only 10% of an artist's listed fee for 'name' acts and nothing for unknown acts.
So please, SMO, Norman and all the others, think, before you say that playing music in a commercial environment, be that an office, restaurant, shop or anywhere else, should be free.
The zero marginal costs argument has damaged the music industry, probably beyond repair. It is the first casualty in this battle of zero marginal costs.
What are you going to do, when it takes your industry away?
