You're an ass. No, it's not FREE to duplicate. It costs money to duplicate and distribute licensed copies of other people's work. And it's not information, it's art. The massive headache you feel is called honor. You're from a culture that now calls stealing liberty. Brave new world, indeed.
Dude, sell tickets to shows, sell merch at shows, don't perform unless paid before hand.
You're an ass.
If all else fails, consider that maybe you don't have a product worth buying, and then improve or leave.
"It costs money to duplicate and distribute licensed copies of other people's work."
Notice that I didn't say anything about licensed copies of other people's work. Duplication--the raw act as shown above--of digital data is effectively free.
Your profits derive from your ability to control the scarcity of your product, right? If a publisher licensed your music and stood next to you at your shows handing out your album for free, you'd be boned, right?
The fact here is that these people can and will make duplicates of your work, and there is nothing you can do to stop them. It's not costing them enough not to, and anything you do to increase that cost--pushing for rediculous prison terms, making blank CDs have a big tax, forcing ISPs to limit service, etc.--hurts society far more than your loss hurts you.
"And it's not information, it's art."
To my capture card in the studio, to my sound board mixing analog signals, to my microphone receiving vibrations in the air, reading a phonebook and playing a song are functionally equivalent. To the hard disk, the bytes look the same. Metadata about "art" or "not art" is lost in the medium.
There may be a great philosophical difference between art and information, there may be a moral difference about how one ought be treated as opposed to the other--but there is no practical difference, and getting paid is about getting practical.
If all else fails, consider that maybe you don't have a product worth buying, and then improve or leave.
I think you shouldn't write this off as "you're an ass". It's rough to hear "you likely won't get full payment for the product itself because it can be pirated", but that is the curse of massive amounts of processing power, digital information, and storage space. It doesn't mean you can't be successful, it just means that traditional cash cows such as prints/CD sales are harder get. You used to be able to record a song once, and sell that song indefinitely. Milk the cash cow. Now, in a world where you could potentially (but not likely) make zero due to piracy, you can't rest on your laurels with an awesome work. It's strange, and like I said in a different post, not unlike software, but in the end, you can fight the whole internet and increasing technology or adapt (or die).
Dude, sell tickets to shows, sell merch at shows, don't perform unless paid before hand.
You're an ass.
If all else fails, consider that maybe you don't have a product worth buying, and then improve or leave.
You're an ass.