The only thing stopping it; the labels that can’t die off quick enough, as in those who don’t want to adapt.

I’m primarily concerned with the artists who want to exchange their art for money – and the audiences who want to exchange their money for art.

Anyway, if Matthew Good was an artist who’d accept his audience’s money (in place of the money offered to him by a label given the prospect of exploiting the suspension of his audience’s liberty to make copies), then hopefully you can see that it would be possible for him to sell his recordings to his audience this way. That audience would then be at liberty to effectively promote him by proliferating copies of his recordings far and wide. They’d also be at liberty to produce cover versions and remixes, etc.

So yes, I would pay him $2.

But given the type of person he is, every time we offer to donate, he refuses, doesn’t feel it should be that way.

If Matthew Good took advantage of a site such as http://QuidMusic.com that let his fans pledge to pay him $2 each to produce a new single, would you pledge to pay him $2?

That’s an old site of mine (I used as a conceptual prototype), but I’m just referring to it to give you an idea of the point I’m trying to get at. It’s still possible to pay artists to produce art, even if the price attached to copies of it is zero. The art is hard work and costs money. The copies cost nothing to produce and may as well be free of charge (if digital).

If Matthew Good would have barbeques based off a lottery draw for $20, I’d so be there. If he had acoustic concerts in public park, out of the common areas of course, for $20 I’d so be there. The same goes for just about any artist.

If Matt said “hey, i’m kinda shy for this recording…” before he finished the sentence people would have already logged in to PayPal. On his site, back when comments were permitted, people often offered to donate, to help pay for moderators to get rid of the shills/trolls.

That would probably piss of Universal, his label, but hey, like I really care what they think. They haven’t done anything to turn me on to Matthew Good, he did with his site (funded by himself) and interacting with the fans via the site and having a private concert (which I didn’t know about) at his former residence, free of charge too.

Firstly, art and knowledge aren’t consumed by individuals as calories, but intellectually digested into knowledge and cultural enlightenment. Secondly, the more a person reads, listens, thinks, and creates the better.

Copies becoming free is a restoration of liberty, not a collapse of the Victorian work ethic. Copies being free to copy is not the same as art being free of charge (free as in speech, not as in beer). It is art that takes the hard work. The copies are a doddle.

People will not become culturally obese in the negative sense, but culturally rich in the productive sense.

As to laziness, the solution is to make engagement, communication, and the relationship between audience and artist as easy as possible. When we can make bargains a mere click away then we can get down to some good business. Exchanging art for money, money for art.

Do you have any favourite artists?

If it was easy to make a bargain with any of them, to offer them a penny in exchange for producing a new single, would you lift a finger to make that bargain? Remember, we’re talking about your favourite artist here – from whom you supposedly cannot get enough.

The future is to pay artists for their art – not publishers for copies.

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day teach a man to fish and he’ll survive a life time.

But I agree with all my soul that our current systems, organizations, and centers are failing under the stress of the information age. What will come of it? I think we’ll find that the self realized individuals will begin to organize organically into groups that are self sustaining and engaged while the world that holds onto old ideas and beliefs (greed and laziness) are left in the cold dark.

This article is great food for thought today. Thanks.

This makes predictions on sales, thus projections of growth on the stock exchange, nearly impossible to predict, as you can’t model taste very well.

Musicians have ALREADY started this, offering value for a price, a variable price with variable value, including value for free. And they have benefited greatly!

It really puts the onus on the content creator, the artist/journalist/etc.. to handle the direct access to readers/listeners. Many are not too keen on that, but it removes the middle person and thus what you earn is yours!

You will always have people not willing to pay, and even if the ‘Net didn’t exist, they would not pay anyhow. Many would pay if they were not told how much to pay, but instead given the option of try-before-buy (from HOME not driving into the store to listen to a preselected list or having to deal with attitude because you don’t like it and since it is opened it’s now “used”).

It’s all about putting the control back where it belongs, creators and consumers.

And for the record, no one here said Radiohead didn’t have value, they said Britney Spears was not worth what they charge, so less value than the price. There are far to many instances where you have 1-2 good songs but you have to buy an album worth to get it. Now you have iTunes, allows for single song selection and sampling.

But iTunes came in the early millennium and took a long time to reach even Canada. People didn’t want to wait, so voila, they download, they get used to it, it becomes a habit, so even with iTunes now in UK and Canada and other G8 countries, you still have to break the habits.

So maybe all the copyright BS and “you can’t sell that there, we’d have to negotiate payments and royalties first” you’d actually be able to roll out something like iTunes faster, everywhere, without bureaucracy and then you’d actually have people not developing the download for free habit.

Again, trying to control slows you down, trying to grab every dime slows you down! The labels/SOCAN/etc… didn’t adapt fast enough because greed and power was on their minds, so they were left behind!

Music recordings have a price – if set by the musician and paid to them by their label.
What doesn’t have much of a price any more are copies (usually set by the label and hopefully paid for by the music lover).

So if the musician is missing out the middleman label they have to ask their audience what price they’d put on their recording, and let their audience pay for it.

No-one’s going to pay for copies any more because they cost nothing to make and distribute.

Let’s forget pricing or valuing copies – it’s a mug’s game.

Let’s move instead to valuing and pricing music recordings. That’s where the money is.

Music has value, and in a market, a price.

The market for copies has ended. The market for music resumes.