http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/Something I keep coming back to. John Rogers, a screenwriter who shares Scott McCloud's ideas on how to get paid if you're serious about working in the arts with your own vision. And how the internet's made it happen.
There's a lot of mileage in this. And it's a good way of retaining control of your work.
To me, it all seems to be tied up with the fracturing of culture and taste tribes. Through from the fifties up to the eighties you could follow the development of culture fairly easily (rock & roll, hippie movement, prog rock, punk, electro, house etc... simplistic, but you get my point). We're now so aware of our cultural history that artists tend not to look just at what's come directly before, but at the whole history of popular music. You now get people like The Go! Team or LCD Soundsystem - it's like listening to a scrapbook, jumping from hip-hop to TV theme tunes to nursery rhymes, or from post-punk to techno to folk.
You can find pretty much anything to match your exact taste. But much fewer people will have the same exact taste as you. So there are more artists out there - fewer superstars, but more people able to find a small audience to pay for a modest living (or even just the bandwidth).
Simple, eh?
