Fliesharing only devalued record companies. Filesharing should be considered free advertising for the next tour. Most musicians have always earned their money performing. They could then sell limited edition bits to the faithful.

That said, keep up the good work.

At this time the web did not exist, so incomes for musicians were at their highest that they’ve been in the last 20 years. Since the advent of the web and filesharing the money has drained out of bands’ hands much further and exponentially faster than book publishing- EXCEPT newspaper publishing- that entire industry is going bankrupt. I think it’s safe to say that being in a band is like being a newspaper writer. When people paid for music and advertisers paid for papers then you got money, add in napster and craigslist and suddenly it’s not commerce anymore and people are suggesting you live on some primitive barter system.

Given the obvious standard of living problem, I got a series of tech jobs, completed my undergrad degree, took graduate-level classes, got multiple certifications. I talked to a friend of mine who was in a successful early 1990s band and released his own records. He lives in a rented apartment with his two kids and owns one 10 year old car. He has virtually no 401k because tops he made $80k one year when his band was hottest, but the next year he barely cracked $40k and all this in a creative city with $1500 rents. He’s a great guy and probably a few dozen people reading this knew is band 15 years ago, but he only sold 800 cds last year and 2000 mp3s on iTunes- no one is paying for music now and he can’t play more than about 20 gigs because of his kids and driving to those gigs is twice as expensive as last year.

I also think about two kinds of books that I bought dozens of just 5 years ago: cookbooks and computer books. I spent so much money on Amazon buying both. Last year I gave away all my computer books because everything I need is online. My wife and I boxed up about half our cookbooks because we can find every recipe we need online. In 2007 and 2008 I spent $0 on either genre of book.

So, to “concretize” my post concretely, very few writers want to have the career arc that Cory has. He is a niche writer in a niche industry where this benefits him, but in other genres, such as reference books, there is nothing but FAIL. In music this is total FAIL and most of my friends who spent their 20s in bands have suffered serious and irreversible financial hardship for doing so. Irreversible because the $50k city condo I bought in 1995 is completely impossible to find for $200k today and condos in our neighborhood are selling for as much as $500k. Houses on my block where I bought for around $200k are selling, after the downturn, for $900k. If you didn’t solidify your position in the 1990s then you will be a slave to the landlord for years UNLESS you move to someplace outside the creative hubs and while I’m sick of the city, I’ve been in these rural areas too and they’re far too backward for my tastes.

So right now, I’m not a musician nor am I a writer. Neither business has revenue streams that would keep me up to where I am now, allow me to pay for daycare and mortgage.

It comes down to financials and Cory is not telling the real truth about them. Is he surfing Canada’s exchange rate bubble right now? Because if so then that’s the source of his well-being, the ability to get paid in one currency and buy a lot of things sold in another currency.

It’s your prerogative to manage how you want to interact with your fans and (publishers!). But usable ebook readers are now just coming onto the scene. They will have an effect on the book market. As with all things media it is just easier to access and store in a digital form.

I know from reading Charles Stross’s “diary” that he hates how the ebook market is setup now. In some cases charging more for his ebooks than the hardcover editions. If that is some of the justification for eschewing to charge for all your ebooks; couldn’t you release a free version and offer a paid version value plus?

I have read most of your books. I find them thought provoking and enjoyable. And I like the fact you release them online for free. That’s how I first discovered your books. Keep up the good work.

I don’t want paper books to go away, really I don’t. But I try to be a good little SF writer/reader, and the future looks bleak for paper. Let’s hope not.

I don’t listen to things like Boney M because there’s nothing new that sounds pleasant. It’s mainly for two reasons:

1. My parents had a LP record which I liked when I was about 7, and I still like it now 20 years later.

2. I can pick virtually any compilation of “Hits from the 60s” and be reasonably sure that most of it will sound good to me.

There was lots and lots of crap in the 60s, I’m sure. I don’t think the 60s were any better music-wise than we have today. But enough time has passed that the worst junk has been forgotten. In contrast, when buying new music I actually have to make sure I’m not buying crap, and that’s a significant requirement for somebody who rarely just sits and listens to music.

There’s enough old music now that I could buy more than what I want to listen to, without getting anything made in the last 20 years.

I also don’t see at all your point about your friend. Do you expect maybe that it should be possible to sell the same 3 CDs for decades without declining sales? Welcome to the real world, then.

Nothing happened to those fans. The ones that wanted the stuff bought the CDs. Eventually the point where everybody who wanted a CD had one was reached. Do you maybe expect the fans to purchase additional copies of the same CDs every year just to give the artist a constant income?

ABBA was insanely popular when it was new. Now it’s included on compilation CDs. It’s not because of piracy, it’s because people heard their parents play Dancing Queen 50 times already and feel no need to get their own copy. There was a time when music by Aqua was heard frequently. Now there are many people who wouldn’t want it for free.

There is a point when the market becomes saturated, especially for the less common genres like alternative music. Maybe there’s another alternative band who people like better. Maybe 20 of them. Maybe he didn’t do enough promotion and people don’t know there’s more content. Or maybe his style changed too much. For instance I really liked Theatre of Tragedy’s Aegis album. But after that they started moving towards a sort of mostly mindless techno that I find very uninteresting, so I’m not going to buy that.

FALK – I thought it was macropayments being discussed here, not micro

I was talking to a pal of mine who plays for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. I asked him if he bought his music or if the internet had changed things. He told me that he hadn’t bought a piece of music in years because he either copies stuff that he gets from music libraries, or the web. Now, this guy makes a nice living, but it’s playing music, not writing it and then trying to sell it. As for cookbooks: I have my few bibles on the shelf, but I’ve pretty much moved to online recipes. I’ve gave away over 100 cook books last year.

What I mean here is that the individual sellers/producers of content don’t have the capability to manage the micropayments alone (at the very least, they need to go through a credit card provider, bank, or Paypal and similar services) so they have to deal with a middleman. That middleman needs to make money off of this, and that’s the main problem: micropayments quickly become macropayments, or the middleman loses his shirt.

Take the case of the Microsoft Points system: you can’t just buy the exact amount of points you need for any particular item, and as a matter of fact, the amounts of points you can buy are designed to prevent you from getting the exact amount you need, so you’ll eventually buy something else, or have to buy more points just to get enough for another purchase.

Plus, I still think they charge way too much for interface skins and especially gamer pictures.

And that’s one of the most successful micropayment systems out there, at this point.

The only system I can think of that’s fair, and similar in concept to a micropayment system is the Microcredit system. Although this is almost the reverse of a micropayment system, perhaps microloans could work well for lesser-known writers, musicians, filmmakers, etc. As a matter of fact, this could become the best way for established creators to help the struggling newcomers.

Yes, I have a friend who is a professional violinist and she does the same thing. She is away from her small children at least one week out of the month. The standard of living she hoped for isn’t there. Can she survive playing at a music festival in Telluride or teaching at violin camp? Sure! But those are financed through local tax dollars or corporate sponsorship. Even ticket sales are too small for symphonies to pay to keep them going without deep pocket benefactors.

But is this constant travel the quality of life she hoped for when she decided on this path 20 years ago? I know she misses her kids and her kids miss her even if at age 21 she was excited to travel the world.

When MeFi introduced a $5 signup fee, Matt was bombarded with jackasses who demanded that he settle flamewars, censor stories, etc, on the basis that “I didn’t pay $5 to read this crap!”

Here on Boing Boing, there’s a bottomless pool of people who think that reading the site for free gives them the right to tell me which subjects I should cover (“Why don’t you write more about the RNC?”) and which ones I shouldn’t (“Enough with the steampunk!”). I can only imagine the sense of totally buzz-killing, life-ruining entitlement that would arrogate to these people if they’d actually spent a dollar or two in addition to clicking on a link to load the page.

The money in creative endeavor stinks. The only reason to do it is because you love it. I’m convinced that taking small sums of money directly from millions of people would establish a miserable, awful career-path.

In general I think Cory is quite right in that the tip jar philosophy of remuneration isn’t a great way to make a living. Yes, you might get the odd person who can afford to make large generous payments; but the model is inconsistent as well as the afore-mentioned issues with high maintainence customers.

I think the best business model – for anyone making a living from creativity – is to offer your work for free for a while, build up a large following and then a) advertise b) sell ‘premium’ content alongside the free and/or c) sell or license to a large corporation (and optionally remain on a salaried basis).

I don’t think filesharing actually has that much with it. Your biggest problem is that music is the most disposable artistic product, and the most non-physical at the same time.

For millions of people, music is more or less a pleasant background noise that they use to silence the world around them, while they drive to work, or sit in the underground. Lots and lots of music gets listened to because it sounds vaguely pleasant but without paying enough attention to actually understand the lyrics.

And, old music doesn’t vanish. And unlike with books, where nothing will replace an actual Harry Potter book, there are thousands of songs in each style, and except to the very dedicated there’s often little need to own a work by a specific artist.

An additional thing is that there’s plenty good old work. I still listen to ABBA and Boney M. There are huge volumes of old music that can be obtained cheaply, which have been conveniently filtered by time, so that the junk of those times has been long forgotten. It’s easier to find good music among collections of stuff from the 60s than among new releases.

If somebody is selling 800 CDs a year, it’s not because there are 100K, 10K or even 1000 people pirating it. It’s because honestly, nobody really gives a damn. That kind of work is waaay down on the list of popular artists, below thousands of others that aren’t recognized by most people.

I’d be willing to bet that 99% of an average pirate’s collection is work by extremely well known artists, who aren’t in much trouble anyway.

This problem won’t disappear even if piracy vanishes tomorrow. The more music there is overall, the less is the relative value of your own work. There’s only so much time people can dedicate to music in their lives, and when the aggregate amount of content multiplies by 10, you’re 10 times less likely to be heard.

I’m convinced that taking small sums of money directly from millions of people would establish a miserable, awful career-path

I know quite a few musicians who follow this career path (apart from the ‘millions of people’ bit) and are reasonably happy with it. The people who buy their CDs don’t seem to have an excessive sense of entitlement.

Are book publishers less evil than record labels? The gist of the article seems to be that publishers are a good way of keeping your fans at arm’s length.

Would you be any less annoyed if your publisher asked you for “more YA novels just like Little Brother”? (By the way, did that happen?)

I can understand the difference in scale (thousands of entitled, paying readers vs one or a few publishers or editors) but there’s still a customer in the equation, even if it’s not a “consumer”.

Royalties are based on the cover price of all copies sold, regardless of bookstore discounts. Depending on the contract, lower royalties may be paid for special promotional sales, bulk sales, etc.

Royalty arrangements are significantly different in technical publishing (computer books), textbooks, and other specialized areas.

I get lots of results for asbestos and travel but none for sex.

filesharing devalued music.

My friend has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 500k copies of three big alternative cds. last year he said he sold 800 cds. What happened to those fans? 1000 people pirating it? Heck, during the napster years we’d see hundreds of different results every single day, try 50,000 people pirating it.

It’s gotten so bad that really creative people I know refuse to put out new records and work in film soundtracks and the like. Know why you still listen to Boney M? Because out there is some 22 year old who could be making amazing music but went into t-shirt design or programming instead due to there not being money in music at all. It’s literally as simple as that and I know two people who quit their bands to do film soundtracks because that’s at least more respected.

Just because a word is outside the city-limits of your current vocabulary doesn’t mean that it’s just been made up.

It’s a big old language, y’know. Lots of words in there. Get a dictionary.

Consumers expect far too much from tip jars, its why most webcomics guys who did tip jars went to merchandise instead, they make about the same profit per person, but the customer wasn’t paying for the webcomic guy or gal to draw, and meet deadlines, but for the t-shirt or mousepad instead.

One thing that anyone with some age will tell you is that in the 1970s the tough kids and wannabe tough kids all wanted to learn to play guitar or drums and that was true up until the early 1990s when I started hearing about local “DJs” but these DJs were horrible and just starting out trying to mix between records and I realized that their personality type and the kid who wanted to be the next Greg Ginn were basically the same- they didn’t have a great voice and they wanted to be like their “hero.” So, you devalue music and you’re left in a period where people continually look back to music like the 1960s for inspiration because the people doing really interesting work have left the music field because they’re no longer heroes.

The same thing happened to poetry after sometime in the mid 1970s. Culturally it ceased to be part of the mainstream. I just bought a large lot of high school yearbooks from the 60s and 70s and every senior had a quote from Whitman or Burns or some real serious poet. Then in the 1975 yearbook they’re all Bob Dylan or Rolling Stones quotes and only the worst nerd is quoting a historical poet. Poetry became interchangeable with song lyrics and I doubt a high school senior could name a modern poet who isn’t a singer.

Is the loss of poetry and the loss of musicians a big loss? I dunno, but I do not believe anyone who suggests that it’s not a corporate decision by the manufacturers of consumer electronic devices to drive content manufacturers out of the marketplace. All the talk about the RIAA and record companies smells entirely of astroturf. It’s a battle of ipod manufacturers vs record labels and the manufacturing lawyers are winning big time in public perception.

Maybe the problem is that the concept of making a living with music is the anomaly? How many recording artists were there in 2000 as compared to 1950? 1900? 1850? Just throwing this out there.