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Comment by jexe | Hacker News Reader

You know what else is interesting - the means to produce music and movies is moving down market, fast. My friggin phone records HD, and my Mac comes with some basic music production software, I can self-publish my own books on amazon or just host them electronically myself.. and this trend is only accelerating.

So will we see less art in the future? Absolutely not - we'll be seeing huge amounts more, and from people who may not have had access to, say, a recording studio in the past. The economics are changing on both ends of the "business," which I think is a net positive.

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Writing good sheet music is very very definitely an art. Even the vast majority of music graduates are unable to do it. Technology will not help with that.

Writing a good book is a serious time commitment. If no one is putting in that time and effort then the quality will decline (it has already, sadly).

The ease of producing media is great and a mark of a better society. But making stuff easy does not make creating quality easy.

I think it is great that one can take an off-the-shelf video camera and make a movie. And this sparks a whole world of creativity. Each day a 100 years of video are uploaded to Youtube.

What we need is a way to compensate professional artists and performers in a world where the cost to distribute is effectively zero. Some stuff (for example a "Michael Moore"-style documentary on the oil spill) is complex enough that it is difficult to produce it without having a way to cover your costs. Does Cory Doctorow's way of doing this scale to movie production?

Oh, and we need camcorders and the like to integrate free codecs - the ones currently available by default often produce H.264-movies which need a license if you want to profit from your work in any way...

> Does Cory Doctorow's way of doing this scale to movie production?

It may: http://www.ironsky.net/

Now if only every Mac also comes with talent pre-installed. And hard work and focus. And years of experience. Oh wait.

We're going to see a lot more writers, but probably less editors and publishers.

While writing a good novel is difficult, writing a good novel without editing is incredibly so. Anyone can publish their work on the internet, but without a framework to pay for professional editing, it's mostly going to be a bit rubbish.

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