Jason Robert Brown has been hailed as "one of Broadway's smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim" — at least that's his self-branding on his website at http://www.jasonrobertbrown.com/about/. Now let's for a moment assume that is true and he's telling the truth on his blog anyway. Then there is a funny story: he found his sheet music, available at 3.99 each, traded "illegally" and worse: for free! on some website — much to his annoyance. So Jason went onto a crusade to eradicate the evil that costs him his livelihood (or so he put it) by writing to some 4000 of these "traders" to … well, stop trading. And many of them obliged, apart from Eleanore (who he chose to call Brenna). She fought back. Actually: she started to have a very sophisticated argument with JRB. It's fun to read, it's eloquent, and it is very enlightening, so much that Jason asked for permission to put it on his blog, here. But just as the arguments really started to hit with Eleanor's last paragraph which I copy below, Jason chose to duck out, cut the discussion with a bunch of irrelevant "stories" and arguing he would have to make a living. To which I'll turn in a second — but here's Eleanor's point:

Most of the teenagers I have met who are into theatre would do the free song before they would do the one for $3.99 unless they had a really good reason. It could theoretically take place the same way. The question is would it? And the answer is probably not. I never said that it was an amazing thing happening and I never said that it doesn't start with what I'm sure seems to you as a bad thing. I "assume that because a good thing comes from an illegal act, it's therefore mitigated"? Well, I have just explained that it is not illegal, so we will leave that alone. Yes. I assume that because something that good comes from something so insignificantly negative, it's therefore mitigated.

So Jason needs to make a living. And he pretends to make that living from selling sheet music at 3.99. Most of the money will end up somewhere between the buyer of sheet music and the composer. He'll probably not get more than 10 %, which is 0.399. Composers earn 34,570 per year (according to Wiki Answers) or anything between 34,667 and 147,628 (salaryexpert.com). Which equals 369,995 copies of sheet music sold per year. While I don't have any statistics at hand what "normal" sheet music revenues are, we now from the famous "My sweet Lord"/"He's so fine" plagiarism case (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976)) that "My sweet Lord" made 67,675 in sheet music sales in 5 years. This seriously leave's me wondering what musical genius this Jason Robert Brown is that 4000 teenagers are so keen to trade his sheet music (while he's busy selling it) and still has time to go into lengthy conversations with them — well, not all of them, but according to his own account, he did check if they responded to his request not to trade.
And why does Jason remind me of Giuseppe Verdi? Verdi had — as one of the only Italian opera composers — the luck to live the introduction of copyright protection for opera in Italy during the early 1840s. And Mike Scherer (The Emergence of Musical Copyright in Europe From 1709 to 1850, HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP08-052) found, that '[a]s his wealth accumulated, Verdi reduced his compositional effort — from 14 operas in the 1840s to seven in the 1850s, two in the 1860s, and one each in the succeeding three decades. The reduction in effort cannot be attributed to declining ability; some of Verdi's great operas are among the handful of late compositions. Rather, his correspondence makes clear, the higher "price" elicited for each opera made it possible to reduce effort along a classic backward-bending supply curve.'