Does Spotify Prove That Metallica Was Right All Along?

Seems like it. To some people’s chagrin, creative individuals, musicians and visual artists included, of course, don’t work for free.

for all that people can make woolly philosophical justifications about information being free and such things, music doesn’t arise from a vacuum. It’s made by people, and those people need to eat. Taking those people’s work for free is objectively wrong, and that’s something that no amount of rhetoric about changing media landscapes and evolving cultural trends and the new Internet generation can ever really change. If artists want to give away their work for free, fine. If not, you damn well pay them for it.

But, y’know, shit, everyone else deserves a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, so why not musicians?

And why not artists?