It seems to me that the argument here is "faux-general"--it generalizes from narrow data reaching narrow conclusions that seem broad. This doesn't mean they are wrong, but it does mean we can't begin to tell.

For me, the problem starts from the identification of "artistic vision" with the degree of integration in the artist's self-made anthologies. That's one aspect of any definition of artistic vision, I'll grant you, but I don't see how it could be a proxy for the rest in any "model" one might care to construct.

The next weak step, as I see it, is the assumption that "popular" music is music. Even the one quality of "artistic vision" you are considering varies more substantially in its significance from "popular" to "classical" to "jazz" to "North Indian classical" forms than you can possibly account for in the categorization (even on continuum) of "permits" or "inhibits" artistic vision. Taking in isolation one movement of a Mozart symphony is not the same thing as taking one movement from a symphony by Mahler, but it is more relevant that taking in isolation one movement of a symphony is not an act measurable on the scale of "S, A, S&A."

The next place where the boards give beneath you is the representation that the iTunes Music Store is the distribution of music. Mr Jobs' contempt for the autonomy of the people he does business with is unmatched. But the pricing policies you discuss are not the result of guesswork: software is deciding what to sell at what price in order at any given moment to maximize the margin of the store as a whole given the people who happen to be shopping in it. Mr Jobs maintains flexibility of the organization of music in order to show his contempt for customers and musicians, as you recognize. He is forced to maintain the 0.99 per song price as a result of the contractual obligations he has to the music companies, who recognize the depth of his contempt for them, and would infinitely rather be relegated to the mercies of anarchism than to a world of diciplined distribution that he controls.

But he does not in fact control music distribution and if artists distribute their own music in the web in return for voluntary payment, which no one has yet any possibility of preventing them from doing, they can express their "artistic vision," under almost any definition that term has, as freely as they want. This does not in any sense require the relaxation of the copyright system. If you turn your website into a little CD-Now of your own music and sell files to people there, you have every copyright power the music companies have, and there's no way they exercise theirs you couldn't exercise yours. Suing your customers will strike you as a bad way, as it should them, but you could do that too if you wanted to.