Making A Living From Art
Filed under General • 01-10-2009 •
How are artists, musicians and writers supposed to support themselves when everything they do can be distributed and downloaded for free? No-one’s figured it out yet, but Amanda Palmer has some passionate words on the subject: Why I’m Not Afraid To Take Your Money.
Scottish author Hal Duncan is trying a brave experiment, distributing copies of one of his short stories directly to fans via his website in return for donations: Scruffians Stamp.*
It seems to me that the music, art, photography, journalism, and fiction industries are all (to a greater or lesser extent) facing the same crisis — a crisis the game industry will probably also run up against in a couple of years. Our dominant means of reaching audiences (teh intartube) favours free distribution, yet artists have a right to be paid for their efforts.
I have a feeling that the next five or ten years are going to prove very interesting…
*Thanks to Futurismic for the link
I think there needs to be a “micro-economy” where people can charge small amounts for downloads. Like a $0.10 Kindle download. Something like universal DRM. Someone sent me a locked PDF the other day to critique, so I know format exist so that people can’t screen scrape your work, they can only view it. You just need an easy way to charge for it.
There is a system called micro-payments. The trick is to set the right level: enough to make a decent return… yet so ridiculously cheap that it just isn’t worth the effort to download/rip an illegal copy.
79p on iTunes is okay for a single song… but the price for a full album is not much different to that of a CD physical copy.