My grandfather, Fallon Ashley, was a newspaperman. That's the name we used — newspaperman — when writing was a trade, not a profession. Fallon was a native of Jackson County Arkansas, one of seven sons of a cotton farmer and horse trader. Of those seven sons, six went to college. One was a mechanical engineer, one a metallurgist, three were doctors, and Fallon was a journalist, graduating with the University of Michigan class of 1917 just before leaving for France to serve as an artillery lieutenant. The only son who didn't go to college was Moreau. He became a rum runner.

Fallon was an intellectual and a liberal in a closed and conservative south. He ran small newspapers in Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri. Sometimes, his move from one town to the next wasn't by choice. Sometimes, it was to protect his family the morning after a cross was burned on their front lawn. My mother still remembers that cross burning and the light it shed on her window. For a dozen years, Fallon wrote his editorials and published his stories until one day in the mid-1930s he just couldn't go on. That was the day my grandfather stopped being a newspaperman. He took his wife and daughter back home to live on the Black River with the cotton farmer and horse trader, to try and get his life back together. Fallon eventually reemerged as a storekeeper, not a newspaperman, and it was as a storekeeper that he ended his career 30 years later.

What ended my grandfather's life as a newspaperman weren't his liberal views, but his liberal credit terms. It wasn't a burning cross, but a lack of cash that ended his dream. Too many subscribers paid for their newspapers with chickens and vegetables. You can't buy newsprint with chickens and vegetables. The Great Depression was the undoing of Fallon Ashley, newspaperman.

In many ways, the Great Depression was the opposite of today. The simplest explanation I ever heard of what a depression is came from an eight year-old girl who said, "That's when nobody had any money." Nobody had any money. They had chickens and vegetables, maybe, but no money. Actually, some people did have money, but they didn't spend it. There was money socked away, but there wasn't any cash being spent. And with nobody spending cash, the economy of the United States just turned-in on itself and more or less shut down.

Contrast that with today, a time when credit card offers rain from the mailbox, when venture capitalists throw billions at new ideas, when stock markets are not far from their all-time highs, when we may not have cash, but we sure have plastic. And when I'm a newspaperman of sorts, but I don't use newsprint.

The difference is liquidity. During the Great Depression, only a few people had liquid money, while today money is much, much easier to obtain. Still, many depression-era attitudes and institutions remain, as I was reminded again and again this week. My inspiration came in the strong reader reaction to one part of last week's column. Nobody had a problem with Steve Morton and his cheap and powerful DSPs. Go Steve. A few NRA members did have problems with my simplistic view of smart guns, pointing out that they might not recognize my fingerprint if I was wearing gloves or wrestling in the mud with some bad guy. Notwithstanding the fact that mud wrestling is no longer a part of my job description, even the gun owners were polite. Nope, it was my negative view of Napster, the MP3 sharing technology, that raised the ire of many readers. They like Napster, and they wonder what's my problem.

So we e-mailed and we talked, and I discovered that most of the Napster defenders weren't big Napster users. Many were musicians, former musicians, and would-be musicians upset with record companies. They didn't much like the quality of most MP3s and they didn't even like Napster, but they REALLY didn't like record companies. And several of them pointed me toward a link at Salon.com in which Courtney Love explained how musicians are a downtrodden class. She calls them sharecroppers. It's a wonderful piece of theater that you can reach through the "I Like" links that accompany this column.

Ms. Love makes the simple point that record companies are scum. They give so little and take so much that most musicians make subsistence livings at best. The record companies take most of the profits, and even that isn't enough. Now they are using their political clout to steal copyrights from artists, changing laws in ways that were never intended by our representatives. Compared to this, Napster is nothing, she says. Napster is good. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It's easy to poke holes in Ms. Love's logic. She decries the short distance a $1 million advance will take a band these days. She faults the record companies for being greedy, yet blames them, too, for the fact that most records aren't even profitable. If record companies are paying for all these loser records, doesn't it follow that's where they are investing their monster share of royalties? You can't have it both ways.

But on the whole, I think she is probably correct. Record companies ARE scum. They are greedy and fearful at the same time. Witness as the best example of this Ms. Love's very interesting observation that despite a billion MP3 downloads last year, record sales went UP. Shouldn't the record companies love MP3s, then, as teasers to get people to buy the real CDs with their better sound and nifty liner notes?

The problem with all this is that we are arguing about the wrong things. The Internet is giving a new form of liquidity to the music business, but that liquidity can only be enjoyed by making more of a paradigm shift than most listeners and musicians seem willing to do. If record companies are bad, stop buying records. If record companies are bad, stop making records. But don't steal, just move on. Record companies no longer control the means of music production or distribution. All they control are copyrights on a lot of old songs we already have in our collections. If musicians are really artists, then they should take their art with them and walk. But I fear that too many complaining musicians aren't artists at all, but willing participants in a corrupt system that they just can't see beyond.

Among her well-reasoned arguments, Ms. Love uses the example of a CD that cost $500,000 to record. This seems perfectly okay to her. Why should a CD, especially a CD by a band like Hole, cost $500,000 simply to put on tape? This makes no sense. It's better to fully embrace the digital future for all phases of the music business just like any other media business. Through clever use of today's technology it is possible to make a good product, sell it for chickens and vegetables, and still make a living. That's what I do here, avoiding so far the fate of my grandfather. But maybe it's an easier transition for journalists to make than for musicians, given the sad fact that there never were any journalism groupies.