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Maybe it’s time to admit that we may never find a way to reconcile consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid.
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It's not like that's a *new* problem. It goes back to when storytellers sat around the marketplace with a bowl and yelled off anyone who listened in too closely without paying.
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Can the market evolve fast enough to keep up with the expectations, and predations, of Generation Free?
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Well, not if the media companies spend their resources trying to patch leaks instead of getting out of the boat business & moving to airplanes. Or whatever the new revenue system is best metaphorized as.
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Generation X, of which I am a member, was probably the last to grow up with the Top 40 and only a few TV stations—and the kind of common taste that this structure instilled.
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And *that's* a big part of the situation that most media companies are ignoring. Top 40 bands are no longer competing with just other Top 40 bands; they're competing with garage bands with a cool MySpace page. Random House authors aren't competing with Macmillan authors; they're also competing with Samhain Press authors, and Smashwords authors, and Wordpress bloggers.
We don't have the shared culture that used to allow companies to count on a certain level of sales for any product they released that connected to that culture. And we have a *lot* of talented amateurs, in every creative field, who now have the resources (if not always the skills) to get their content out to people who are interested in it.
The media companies (and to some extent, content producers) need to stop fretting about unauthorized, unpaid copies, and worry about how to convince the people who've never heard of their products to buy them.