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insist that we should become mere clerks, working in an obscure
back-room, leaving you to commune with our audiences on our
behalf?”
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years
later, Napster showed us that, as William Gibson noted, “We may
be at the end of the brief period during which it is possible to
charge for recorded music.” Surely we’re at the end of the period
where it’s possible to exclude those who don’t wish to pay. Every
song released can be downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer net-
work (and will shortly get easier to download, as hard drive price-
performance curves take us to a place where all the music ever
recorded will fit on a disposable pocket-drive that you can just
walk over to a friend’s place and copy).
But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording
artists to reach a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your
potential fans may be spread in a thin, even coat over the world,
in a configuration that could never be cost-effective to reach with
traditional marketing. But the Internet’s ability to lower the costs
for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to find art-
ists suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever
before.
Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the
live performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use
your recordings — which you can’t control — to drive admissions
to your performances, which you can control. It’s a model that’s
worked great for jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. It’s
also a model that won’t work for many of today’s artists; seventy
years of evolutionary pressure has selected for artists who are
more virtuoso than charismatic, artists optimized for record-
ing-based income instead of performance-based income. “How
dare you tell us that we are to be trained monkeys, capering on a
stage for your amusement? We’re not charismatics, we’re white-
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