(Digital Rights Management , it’s a way of preventing people from sharing songs without paying) but I’m being sloppy. To rewrite it:

On the last point, I’m wondering who would pay anyone but you in a free-to-share-1s-and-0s world? Maybe they pay the person who helped them get a copy a few cents for the effort… but enjoying your music they might send you much more in appreciation for your original work. The first person may have been their doorway into your art, but you are and always will be the creator of it.

RE: Is it fair and should it be:

Maybe it comes down to what do we mean when we say “fair”. If you were told that you’d be paid a certain way and so you work, then all of a sudden everyone realizes they aren’t willing to force people to behave a certain way for such low stakes. Yeah that feels unfair. But it’s also unfair to force people in such an arbitrary way. Maybe it’s like the people caught between the american revolutionaries and the British. I’m fuzzy on details for this analogy, but real people lost their shirts because they assumed that business would continue as usual, but when the Americans didn’t want to buy from where they were supposed to, suddenly they were at a huge business loss. That doesn’t feel fair. I’d argue it is though. They just had risk in their business that maybe they didn’t realize they had.