This is how art worked for millenia; someone commissions a chapel roof painting, someone commissions a concerto, someone commissions a statue, someone buys a chair, etc.

Artists still do this today, and there is no issue determining value beforehand. Artists list their commission prices, or their hourly costs, etc. This is a perfectly normal thing that happens everyday.

I don't know. Anyone funding the work is accepting a risk.

> Should they not have been paid after 1991?

They definitely should get paid for their shows and live performances. The band itself can't be copied. Artists are extremely scarce.

Their art, however, is not. Once created, the scarcity of their recordings is artificial and fundamentally time limited anyway. Even if I were extremely tolerant of copyright, I'd argue for a term of only 5-10 years maximum with absolutely no possibility of extension.

In other words, even if we accept copyright as legitimate, they sure as hell shouldn't still be getting paid for some late 80s album. They've already been adequately compensated for those creations. If they want more, they should have to keep making new stuff so that they can benefit from new copyrights which will also expire after a short time.

Creators are not supposed to be able to strike gold once and then enjoy eternal royalties. Copyright must have short time frames or it's in breach of the social contract. The reality is we're doing creators a favor by pretending that it's hard to copy their stuff so they can make some money. We do this because they assured us that eventually all of it would belong to us: works would the public domain.

The copyright industry isn't keeping up their end of the bargain. They continuously pull the rug out from under us by extending copyright to the point we'll be long dead before our culture is returned to us. It's offensive and we should all stop pretending. They need reminding that public domain is the natural and default state of all intellectual work.

> How would you predict that value before its creation (or even after)?

I'd look at the artist's past work. If there is no past work, then I don't know.

> If you're saying that only the labor has value

I'm not saying that at all. Creations are valuable. Creators are valuable. The labor of creation is valuable.

Value is assigned to stuff by humans. Obviously humans value art. The price however is given by supply and demand. The fact is that supply of intellectual works approach infinity after they are created and therefore their prices approach zero. So it makes perfect sense to assign prices to the labor of creation but zero sense to assign a price to the product of creation. Copyright is an exercise in denying reality.

> and all labor is valued equally

I definitely did not say that. All labor is different. I value some creators a lot more than others. Some creators I don't value at all.

> that sounds sort of like marxism

I must apologize if I gave that impression. I hate marxism.