The evidence thus far indicates no decline in the volume of new recorded music products forthcoming since Napster. It is possible, however, that the new music is coming from artists who were established prior to Napster. While products still come to market, it is possible that new artists are not establishing careers.

To explore this we examined the albums on three analogous best-of lists, for the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s, from Pitchfork Media. For each of the 300 albums, we determined the year the artist released his, her, or their first recording (whether an album, a single, or an "EP"). These data allow us to calculate the career age of an artist at the time he has an album on a best-of list. The question is whether artists have continued to establish careers since 1999. To explore this, we calculate the share of best albums since 1999 whose artists’ first recordings appeared after 1999. Since 1999, 49 percent of artists on the best of the 2000s list debuted following Napster. Figure 9 shows this year-by-year pattern: there is a systematic, although not a monotonic, rise from 10 percent of albums in 2000 to 100 percent at the end of the decade. On average, about half of the best-of albums since Napster are from artists whose recording debut occurred since Napster.

Although this is clearly a substantial share, determining whether the launching of new artists has changed requires a comparison with earlier periods. To this end, we calculate analogous annual shares for the two previous decades, the annual share of 1980s best-of albums from artists debuting after 1979, and the share of 1990s best-of albums from artists debuting after 1989. All three patterns are very similar, rising fairly steadily to 100 percent by the end of each decade. A regression of a dummy for whether an artist debuted since the decade of his appearance on dummies for years since the beginning of the decade and a dummy for the post- Napster decade confirms the lack a statistically meaningful difference in the tendency for new artists to appear on the list since Napster.

In the Napster era, some attributed the ascent of pirated digital music to a supposedly criminal-minded nature among American youth. The argument didn't work. "It coincided with the largest fall in the rate of crime in recorded history," Shirky said.

"That four-year lag [between Napster and iTunes] is where the music industry lost the battle," said Sonal Gandhi, music analyst with Forrester Research. "They lost an opportunity to take consumers' new behavior and really monetize it in a way that nipped the free music expectation in the bud."

Music industry executives can tell themselves that as long as they want. But under conditions of perfect competition, the price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0. That's not a question of habit, you can look it up in all the leading textbooks. Of course real businesses rarely operate in circumstances of perfect competition, and record companies have a variety of political and legal tools they can deploy to try to protect monopoly rents. But this is hard to do. I think the real story with the iTunes store is that over time competitive pressure has impelled it to largely drop DRM and over time I expect we'll see that the CPI-adjusted price of songs declines.