Money, it’s a… medium of exchange for goods and services
KeithHandy posted in Business on July 23rd, 2006
How, ideally, should I be making money? With some of the tools I’m coding, and some of the insight that I’ve gained recording and producing music, I certainly have a lot of value to potentially provide to other musicians. I’ve done paid recording sessions for my friends. Independent music sites, such as CD Baby, encourage us to support our fellow artists by purchasing from the same sites that we sell on. The meta-problem is this:
Artists can’t just make money off of other artists.
That would be like a dead-end pyramid scheme — the money has to eventually come from somewhere else, or eventually it would crap out and leave someone with the short end of the already-too-short stick. To survive in the macroeconomy, we have to somehow make money from the non-artists that provide us with boring things like food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and medicine. Right now all those people are buying their media from large companies. We need to appeal to them, not to “support” us, but to see that they need us; we need to be valuable to them.
In other words, if I make a living by providing production and mastering tools for non-corporatized musicians, it’s a finite quantity of money. Sure, it may be enough to even get me through the rest of my life, but it’s still a well being depleted if it somehow doesn’t connect to the rest of civilization somewhere along the line, and ultimately the whole point of this “life” thing isn’t to grab stuff and fuck people over.
Imagine a single poverty-stricken family in an otherwise well-off small-town neighborhood. Imagine this family is resourceful enough that each member sells some goods and services to keep afloat, but they avoid interacting with the rest of the townspeople because there are just too many bad vibes out there. Father sells his goods to daughter, daughter to mother, and mother to son. They “keep it in the family”. It’s clear to see that this family is on the fast lane to eviction. Now pretend they’re all musicians, Flash animators, open source programmers, and video bloggers, and multiply that by a few million.
Enter the the big corporations. You can try to market your talent to them, but then you have to cry every time you see it being used for evil purposes. The good part is that now the financial flow includes your plumber and your dentist, so you know you’re not dooming artistkind to an eternity of leaky pipes and rotting teeth. The bad part is that you’re helping to fill the world with … just go out there and listen, need I say more?
Since these monoliths have crippled their own creative potential (including the potential to embrace new creativity from outside their own tinted-glass doors) by their very nature, we can’t rely on them. But we can’t ignore them either. They know how to connect to Joe Normal, and we need to study how they do this. Keep in mind “Joe Normal” is not the same as “Joe Amoral” — thugs will always be thugs, and we don’t need to sell to them, nor would that be good for the macroeconomy — but we do need to figure out how to show our value to the people out there that provide us with roads, houses, schools, socks, refrigerators … you get the idea.
