Here is a post from a musician about his disillusion about the INternet asnd the supposed promise of the abundance economy:
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You may have gotten the impression that I don’t like the Internet. Some people certainly have. Some are convinced that the reason for it is my ignorance of how it works.
The truth is I am deeply disillusioned about how it turned out and I’ll take this opportunity to tell you why.
The Internet should have been a godsend to musicians and creators of replicable works in general, for two reasons:
1.The two biggest problems an independent creator faces are distribution and promotion, which in the past meant the need to deal with publishers (and all associated creative and financial trade-offs). The Internet has enabled even the smallest business to reach a potentially global consumer base.
2.Creative works such as books, movies and music are pretty much the only products (others include software and news) that can be delivered on-line and as such seem custom-fitted to e-commerce.
Looking at the two points above, we see that the Internet should have opened wide new vistas for the creative sector and enabled thousands of independent creators to flourish without the need to court big business. So why didn’t it pan out that way?
Or did it? Some would say it did. However, looking at matters realistically, the amounts earned from creative output delivered through the Net verge on the laughable.
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He goes to analyse the business of making money through Internet music sales, and concludes:
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These numbers should serve to illustrate that whatever benefits “music 2.0″ may have, it’s certainly done nothing for the recording artist, save make her noticeably worse off than she was in the old CD-based market. If recording artists ever go the way of the blubber merchants, it won’t be because there’ll be no demand for their product. It will be because making recordings makes no economic sense.
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The point is the same for the independent authors. If Indie writers and writers in general cant make money through the Internet, eventually they'll just stop publishing. We may simply be leaving thjrough an age of TEMPORARY abundance- that will last until writers just stop writing.