(You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)
So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans.
Innovation always has its side effects good and bad, but those who want to entertain and be famous will still have all the motivation and incentive to be creative and strive for the spotlight. They won't be making off too bad for themselves, either.
It's side effects will also be increased automation, which means unions shouldn't use the government to inflate wages of jobs that could otherwise be automated with a machine.
This isn't a new model. Most artists already rely on both performance and recording revenues (some add licensing and/or merchandising). So we're essentially talking about the old model, except with the apparent proposal that we remove revenue from recordings.
That's removing a leg from a stool that's already frequently shaky to begin with, except for mass-market pop acts that have already made it (Iron Maiden is, more or less, one such act).
> Innovation always has its side effects good and bad
Can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh?
You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open.
"You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open."
Wrong question.
The correct question is, "How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people?" Or possibly, "How much damage do you want to do to other, more important industries in order to protect a small one?"
I can only assume that's what's going on here, given that nothing I've proposed would reasonably prompt your questions.
I suppose I'll respond anyway, though:
> How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people?
Wealthy? I suppose there are some pop acts that make it so big that they become pretty wealthy. These are indeed folks (like Iron Maiden) that could continue to enjoy good business even without much recording revenue at all, but they're no more a representative sample for the sake of discussion here than most hackers are (or ever will be) Mark Zuckerberg wealthy.
As it happens, I am willing to distort society a little, in much the same way that the original copyright bargain does, for the same reasons. I think that the norm should remain that recordings are something people should pay for. That's it. No need for SOPA or DRM required everywhere by law or million dollar fines for vigorously prosecuted individual violations. Piracy still exists, and may even be often treated as discussed in the article, but people who do it know it for what it is and that the approved (and supportive) way to participate in getting recordings is to either purchase or download from where they're explicitly free.
Probably wouldn't do terrible damage to other "more important" industries.
Seems like developers and open-source. There's no proven instructions on how to have a profitable career developing open source software. There's a few exceptions, but mostly it seems to require selling services, or intentionally crippling the software and using open source as a marketing scheme.
(Go on surprise me and prove me wrong - let me know you are in a band that is well known).