How do we continue to support ourselves?

There seems to be, on the part of the consumer, an expectation that information (photos, text, video and audio) be delivered as a ‘free’ commodity.

Like it or not, I have a strong feeling that such sentiment will not just go away.

One benefit from the eventual (near, if not complete) collapse of the paid-for music industry will be that artists are free from their labels, to do, play and be what they want.

Sure, they might sell fewer albums overall, but keep a higher percentage of the revenues. And they can sell t-shirts and tickets.

I have not a doubt in my mind that we will, in my lifetime, see most newspapers and magazines delivered to us online and in print in exchange only for our marketing demographics. And each one will have ads specific to the reader enclosed.

But in the meantime, for the photographers, writers, designers, editors (less so) and other commercial artists, we’ll have to do what we can to just hang on and make it through.

Now is a time for us to experiment in the market and get our work out there in different ways.

Let’s just hope that there is, in fact, a light at the end of the tunnel.