This Post Is Valueless

This is... bizarre:

"Right now if you buy a bottle of water it's £1," he said. "A piece of music is a valuable form of art. If you want the person to respect it and value it, it's got to cost them not a huge sum of money but a significant sum of money."

It isn't altogether clear what kind of value is being posited here. If a piece of music is being said to be fiscally valuable, then of course nobody will value it at £X if its market price is lower than £X, but to explain price in terms of price is hardly enlightening. If the value in question is æsthetic, cultural, etc. then the claim appears to be that people on the whole cannot know about or respond suitably to that value without guidance in the form of a retail price: so I can judge that the works of Shakespeare are æsthetically worthless because Project Gutenberg makes them available for free, but you can be satisfied that the doodles on my notepad are of some cultural worth because I decline to part with them for less than a two-figure sum.

I suppose it is true that the care I take with an object is connected to the potential cost to me of replacing it: one does not, for example, treat a First Folio lightly, since few exist and none is exactly like another. If only a digital audio file were the kind of readily copiable item which could be limitlessly reproduced at negligible cost...

Edited to add: this post is not subsidised by the government of France.