Some artists - at music, cinema, fiction, etc. - as well as some recording and distribution houses, publishers, and others have embraced the internet and found new ways to distribute their work and make a buck at it.

Others are the moral equivalent of the buggy-whip makers who were all bent out of shape when automobiles began displacing horse-and-buggy as the primary means of transportation. They’re hanging onto the past and lobbying to have their old ways protected by legislation.

Let’s remember that the vast music publishing industry, and the vast cinema-publishing industry are both creatures of the twentieth century and of twentieth-century technology. Artists have existed through the ages, and have prospered or not. It’s only been the movie studios and the “star” system, and then the recoding industry and their equivalent star system that have made multi-millionaires out of people with musical or cinematic talent. Good on ‘em, I suppose, for as long as it lasted (and the system does have a few more years in it, I suppose). But it’s on the way out, being replaced by a new model.

In some ways, it’s a more personal model, with indy artists and others creating their own recordings (music, cinema, and new forms) and distributing them directly on the web, and guess what? Before the twentieth century, performance art was ALL carried out according to the “personal model”. All performances of music or theatre were live. From the finest national and cosmopolitan acting troupes, giving command performances before Kings and Queens, to the most rag-tag gypsy troupes and troubadours and buskers, travelling between towns and villages, collecting what the ordinary people were willing to toss for an engaging performance.

Imagine if we come full circle and recordings - whether on media like CDs or as downloadable, shareable files like MP3s and their successors - can no longer make the artists (and their producers and distributors) into millionaires and billionaires. Imagine if, instead, the recordings are just a side business or an adjunct that makes little or no money, and the real money-makers are live performances in front of paying audiences. Instead of touring to sell more records or CDs, the artists will sell (for a relative pittance) or give away recordings in order to generate interest and demand for their touring shows.

Maybe it’s just been an aberration of a half-dozen decades that people can become hugely wealthy for acting, directing, singing, just because there was a controlled-access distribution model. Maybe now, with the sweeping popularity of easily transferable (and infinitely duplicable) files, there’s a new model that’s superseded the previous one and that is forcing real artists back to the basics of entertaining their audiences in person. If nothing else, the shift will ensure that there are no more manufactured pop groups that get by on glitz and lip-syncing.

The music artists, actors, screenwriters and others need to give up their recent attempt to tax us into compliance with their desire to hang onto the old paradigm. It’s too late. The paradigm has shifted. You can tell they are desperate when they want every man, woman and child labeled as a thief and forced to pay a thieves tax every time we purchase any medium or device that could possibly hold a recording of music, video, or whatever. Just as with CDs (on which we’ve been paying a surcharge for years) there are many, many uses for hard drives, thumb/jump drives, SD cards, etc., etc., that have nothing at all to do with ripping off pirate recordings of music or video.

It’s time to recognize that it’s pointless and harmful to allow such stopgaps to benefit those who got rich on the old model, now that the new model is here.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright April 2008