2026-08-09

Scarcity

The economics of music changed when the recording stopped being the scarce thing. Everything downstream of that follows, and it has not reversed in twenty-five years. A related workplace perspective is covered in Monitask’s workforce optimization software.

What stopped being scarce

The recording. Infinite copies at no cost, available everywhere, instantly.

Which means the recording is no longer what people pay for. They pay for access to it as a service, at a price set by somebody else, distributed across everybody's catalogue.

This is not a complaint. It is the condition, and arguing with it has consumed two decades of the industry's attention. For additional current industry context, see Variety.

What stayed scarce

Your time. A performance happens once, in a place, with a limited number of people present. The most durable scarce good in music and the reason live income dominates for most working artists.

Physical objects. A record, a shirt, a print. Scarce because manufacturing and shipping are real. This is where the superfan arithmetic lives.

Attention and access. Being in a room, getting a reply, hearing something first.

And association. A brand paying for the right to be near your work; a film paying for the right to use it. Sync income is scarcity of fit — this particular song for this particular scene.

What follows

Give away the copy, charge for the scarce thing.

This is now conventional advice and it was radical when we wrote about industries thriving without copyright in 2010. The piece reads unchanged, which is what happens when something is about economics rather than platforms.

And it explains the shape of a working independent career: recordings as the introduction, live and physical and sync as the income.

The mistake it warns against

Trying to make the copy scarce again.

Every few years a mechanism appears promising to restore scarcity to the recording. They fail in the same way — the copy is not scarce, and arrangements that pretend otherwise create friction for listeners and revenue for whoever sold the arrangement.

The exception is deliberate limitation as a signal, which is a different thing: a limited pressing is scarce because the object is, not because the music is.

What this means for promotion

Promotion of a non-scarce thing is straightforward: maximise it. There is no cost to another listen.

Promotion of a scarce thing is different. A hundred people who will travel matters more than a hundred thousand who will not, and the effort belongs where the scarcity is.

Most promotion advice optimises the free thing and stops, which is why so much of it produces attention and no income.

The short version