I Want a Better Way to Reward Artists and Creators
Let’s say you borrowed or downloaded a book or a CD and you really liked. Now you’d like to reward the artist, author or creator for their work, so that they will be able to continue producing more of the things that you enjoy. So if you ask: “how can I reward the creator?”, the typical answer will be, go and buy their CD, book, etc.
Being an author myself (I published two books on technology), I know very well that only a tiny part of the money paid for the product goes to its creator. Most of the money is being consumed by the middle man (resellers) and the publishing house. e.g. in my case I was getting 10% of the net profit (not the book price!) made by the publisher. Which was about 2% of the book’s price and even less if it was sold at a discount.
Now imagine that instead of paying $20 for that CD or a book, you could just donate the royalty directly to the creator. A $1 “donation” would be often more than the royalty the creator would receive from their publisher. Won’t you donate $1? or $3? or $5? It didn’t cost you anything to get the product after all. I’m sure most people would be very happy to do that.
The problem is that at the moment there is no way to accomplish that simple transaction. Yes, there are a few artists and creators out there who have a tip jar on their site, but most don’t. I want to have a new website that will act as a clearing house to accept token payments for authors, musicians, artists and other creators, and which then will send the funds directly to the artists. Of course that functionality could then be embedded into artists’ websites and forums to make it easier for fans to find a way to give back. Of course that clearing house could charge a small transaction fee to support itself, but it’ll be still a huge win for creators and their fans.
This will also change the face of the peer2peer networks, where the illegal downloading will become instead a more efficient way to distribute creative products, cutting out the middle man, while directly supporting the artists.
Any takers?
Update: Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting essay, called “Better Than Free“, where he presents 8 ways to make money from freely available goods. He suggests that it’s only a matter of time before everybody will have to embrace those, so become an early adopter…
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How would you pay for your book to be printed if the reader was getting it for free then donating money directly to you the author?
Mike, I was talking about an online digital distribution.
I think it sounds like a great idea. When artists start saying they understand why people pirate their work it should be a major wake up call for the industry. However, they just march on with their ridiculous practices. Allowing digital distribution at a fair price would be the way to go for any artist. We have digital distribution now, but with DRM, download times, media to put it on, etc. it costs more instead of less. The cost of such distribution should be no more than that which goes to the artist and the site that makes it available. Great idea, I would love to see it happen.