If no one owns the music, then where is the value?

The concept of copyright continues to be attacked, mainly by the owners of existing copyright(s) who created/purchased property under current copyright assumptions. They fear a future where their property will be stolen, so they want their ownership fortified.

Jeff Jarvis is arguing that these people are losing the battle, and will lose the war in the somewhat near future.

He says that the ultimate value of content ("pre-recorded music" for those of us cluttering up the music business) either reflects trust or represents trust outright. That somehow, there's something less and less tangible (or taxable) about a recorded performance. Or an image. Or any entertainment. That, what we all find value in, is a guarantee of entertainment.

The philosophical discussion at the above link makes a lot of sense"

Content is transient, its value perishable, its chance of success slight. You think your article or book or movie or song or show is worth a fortune and in a blockbuster economy, if you were insanely lucky, you could be right. But now anyone can create content. And thanks to the power of the link — and the trust it carries — anyone can get the world to see it. Is some of this new load of content crap? Sure. Lots of content in the old media world was crap, too. But don’t calculate the proportions. Look instead at the gross volume of quality: There’s simply more good stuff out there than there could be before. And it can be created at incredibly low or no cost.

There is no scarcity of good stuff. And when there is no scarcity, the value of owning a once-scarce commodity diminishes and then disappears. In fact, it’s worse than that: Owning the content factory only means that you have higher costs than the next guy: You own the high-priced talent or infrastructure while your new competitor owns just her own talent and a PC...

...But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.

And once you get your head around that, you will see that you can grow so much bigger so much faster with so much less cost and risk.

So don’t own the content. Help people make and find and remake and recommend and save the content they want. Don’t own the distribution. Gain the trust of the people to help them use whatever distribution and medium they like to find what they want.

I just don't understand how anyone could make money on this--charging for trust when the replication costs are so astoundingly low and trust being a bit, well, liquid in the beginning--and I'm sure that Jeff Jarvis' response would be, "Well, the people that figure that out will be the ones who make the most money."