Capitalistic Communism

While getting into my car today I saw a CD on the floor. Not a burned CD, but an actual CD of a band I really bought. It got me thinking about how the music industry has changed. CDs are more or less a thing of the past. I know of only a few remaining places in Boulder I can even buy a CD. Clearly much of the music industry has gone online, but there are daunting tasks to businesspeople to deal with to actually produce a profit while competing with music piracy.

While I don't know how they will do it per se, I do know that innovative people will keep the wheels turning on the industry. People will always want music and even if the industry changes completely, bands will still need compensation for doing what they do and the people who organize them will need compensation too.

Websites like Facebook, Pandora Radio and others provide free services and have business models that can produce enough profits to at the very least, stay afloat. There seems to be a trend of people wanting stuff for free, and these businesses have found a way to do that.

Is it possible that in the future, distant or otherwise, that the demand for free products will be so great that an business has to offer a free, or very cheap product just to compete? It's conceivable that the realization of communal goods will end up to be the only real way of competing in a marketplace in the future. That's the idea of capitalistic communism. The sharing of goods, services and information for communal good, while providing funding by the interaction of entities in the supply chain to produce the product.

If this were to happen, I don't think it would get to the point where every product was completely free, because if nobody is paying ANYTHING, there is no inflow of money into the system. But I don't think it's beyond imagination for industries and prices to change dramatically based on this idea.