Given such a new music industry paradigm (along with a host of other new and highly pervasive sharing models) the economics of free is especially good news for young people, and most specifically for students — which today we all like to think we are in spirit until aged 50 at least. 

Being short of money and by extension "youthful" is practically chic. And "free" as the price of any digitalised or digitalis-able product is now more than a desirable price for the youthful, real or wannabe. Free is an absolute expectation. 

Free also tends to mean free, not almost free. In Japan, young consumers are paying small amounts for their mobile phone entertainment streams, but in the West there's a crucial difference between cheap and free, according to Josh Kopelman, a venture capitalist quoted in a recent Wired magazine article on the economics of free. Kopelman calls this "the penny gap".

"People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all," Kopelman is quoted as saying by Wired's editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, who is also author of a 2009 book, FREE. 

Another way of understanding how Kopelman's penny gap has made principled tightwads of us all is to consider your own attitude to a search engine like Google. Ask yourself how much, in monetary terms, Google is worth to you as a searcher. (Businesses using Google as a sales driver are excused from this exercise as they know well that for them it's almost as expensive a medium as "old media".) I imagine I am fairly typical as a consumer of Google in using the site dozens of times a day. If Google were to ask me for, say, £200, or even £2,000 a month for their services, it would be hard to argue that it was not worth the money: Google does a job in nanoseconds that would take months for an army of researchers. Yet in reality, any search engine that asked searchers for a few dollars a month, or even a few pennies, would go out of business in an hour. Even if some people were prepared to pay, the business would implode because its model is dependent on vast numbers of people using it. 

Free, therefore, the free-ness that students used to be attracted to in the form of complimentary ballpoints when they opened a bank account, is now almost part of our DNA, thanks to the internet. And the sharing notion spearheaded by the economics of free happily meshes with other current philosophies. Sharing resources is a siren call, for example, to those concerned about the environment and overconsumption. Further, it accommodates the idealistic need that billions of people now harbour for a viable expression of some kind of egalitarianism, now that socialism is widely regarded as dated and inadequate. 

The sharing ethic also satisfies a need, motivated notably by Ralph Nader-ism and later consumers' rights movements, to reboot the relationship between business and the individual, in favour of the individual, but with concomitant benefits to clever businesses. The internet is a perfect leveller of the retail playing field, according to the Texan computer magnate Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers and arguably as revolutionary a figure in computing as Henry Ford was in personal transport. Thousands of acres across the world housing massive hangars of Dell servers are the physical reality of the internet, the home of the much-vaunted "Cloud" of shared information and computing capacity.