Paying the creative

It’s a mixed up muddled up messed up world. It’s also fast becoming obvious that the future of content is digital, is online and is on demand.

But, as the maker of Steal This Film said on Pods and Blogs recently “The internet is one big copy machine”.

This basically means that, no matter how hard the ‘industry’ tries - it will never stop people getting their content for free - it won’t stop people downloading through bit torrent.

So the big Question for the future has to be - how do artists and creatives get paid for their work?

I’m going to work on a series of posts looking at different ideas over the next month or so - part based on interviews I’ve done with people in the industry, people working on the fringes and creatives themselves.

Some of the ideas include:

A Broadband content charge
A fee paid by every broadband subscriber on top of their normal costs that goes to rights holders like the BPI and collection agencies.

The problem with that model is that the money still won’t be going to the people that actually create the content - it will be going to the big labels.

Optional subscriptions
This could work around a range of new ‘groups’ where people create their content and publish it (PodShow is an example) and either give it away free or sell it or offer it as a subscription.

Other ideas to come.

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