For art's sake
Summary Description Are we getting any closer to the secret of making money from art and music online? Simon Vandore's not too sure.

Introduction
It was easy for graphic artists. Once they learned how to make GIFs and JPEGs and minimise file sizes, the Internet was their $100 per hour oyster.

Body
For writers, musicians and others, making a buck online has proved more difficult. The Web needs visuals, not epic novels. Even short stories are relatively unpopular in digital form, because few readers are comfortable following multiple paragraphs on a screen. Printing it out, adding toner and removing paper jams are extra steps not required by paperbacks.
Musicians have suffered most from the dilution of copyright. There's a survey currently in the news which reveals 'most Americans' believe music on the Internet should be free. Oh yeah? Then so should food and housing for musicians. Audiences at gigs are diminished and radio is often too formulaic to help.
At the same time, I think the bandwagon is wrong. MP3 is not a threat. It is the same as unauthorised redistribution of this article -- the Internet makes it natural and unavoidable. We have to adapt to this and figure out new ways of ensuring an income, not fight a losing battle. Unfortunately I remember writing the same thing in 1995 about copyright 'threats' to all art forms and five years later, here we still are.
I am sure the solution is to control the point of origin. In the same way that I have sold this article to Newswire, perhaps the right to release Metallica's next single could be sold to Yahoo. This would create a whole new income source from singles, sales of which are flagging outside the teen market. I don't think album CD sales are about to fall, because MP3 collection is all about individual tracks.
Yes, the MP3 file would quickly lose its value as it entered the Napster universe, but tens of thousands of fans would be all over Yahoo prior to release. Imagine the page impressions and the brand awareness! People are drawn to the point of origin, just as when a highly anticipated computer game demo is released online.
I notice Stephen King did a similar thing with his novella 'Riding the Bullet' in March, and some of the Web sites with the right to host it were unable to cope with the incredible traffic. He has now started a private Web venture to serialise his next novel, 'The Plant', asking readers for $US1 each time they read a chapter and only publishing the next chapter when 75% of readers have paid for the previous two.
This is cutting-edge stuff and I'm not sure if it will work. It might, because it's Stephen King and his fans are willing to blink at a screen to get their fix. New writers are not so lucky, but perhaps they can take inspiration from the return to serialisation of a novel. Many classics, such as Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, were written this way, but it fell out of favour when book publishing became cheap and ubiquitous. Online collaboration also offers new possibilities for artists which they are only just beginning to explore. Perhaps one day, serialisation and collaboration could lead to multimedia art forms which might not be as cheesy as they sound.
New writers and musicians are still going to struggle. You can't become JK Rowling overnight, and it's daunting to be an artist in an age of ecommerce and economic rationalism where the definition of supporting yourself is blurred. Whoever gets it right will be a hero.
Just be careful who you deal with. According to the ABC, Stephen King's serialised novel is "about a climbing plant which takes over the offices of a publishing company, offering it financial success in exchange for human sacrifices". I hope it's not analogous to the Net!
Vandore appears each Friday on Newswire.