Yeah, I think you’re right. The fact is, despite being a big consumer of free, I don’t think I spend less of my budget on music and writing than I would otherwise. I’m not worried about the future of music at all – as Dennis implied (I think), the great bulk of musicians have always made whatever they made off music by playing live – it must be only a tiny minority that ever made anything like a living off recordings.
The future of quality journalism and extra-academic scholarly writing (e.g. Wall Street and LBO) is way more of a worry. (Although, it has to be said, that it was not exactly thriving before.)
There is clearly a niche for subscriber-supported media that’s not going away. Personally I subscribe to six print/paywalled-online publications (including of course LBO!), and all up it comes to several hundred dollars a year. But it must already be just about a saturated niche, time-wise as least as much as money-wise – when you’re paying you really want to read to get your money’s worth and I doubt many people have the spare time to really read more than a few subscriptions.
Also, just because subscriber media survives doesn’t mean it’s not surviving partly by squeezing the contributors. There was a lesson in this recently in Australia. Two left/liberal-targeting publications emerged into the fresh new media air. There was New Matilda, serious and kind of Nation-like in vibe. Then there was Crikey – a ragged political gossip and analysis daily email newsletter, with contributors all over the political spectrum – more conservative on the whole, but with a lefter left than the New Matilda (for me, Guy Rundle alone is worth the subscription). They were competing for the same market – I doubt that many people would subscribe to both.
New Matilda was in trouble and tried to switch back from a subscriber model to an ad-funded free model. This year it stopped publishing. Basically, the publisher said it couldn’t carry on without paying contributors less, and it didn’t want to do that. Another editor (of the Inquisitr) wrote a snarky piece saying he wasn’t surprised the New Matilda was unsustainable since it was paying contributors $100-$200 per piece (usually 1000 words+), ludicrously high, he believed. Crikey pays freelancers $100 per piece, and seem to be just scraping by. At least Crikey’s publisher admits it’s a poor rate – but the judgement is apparently that it would not be viable to up the subscription rate enough to pay even what print freelancers get.
A piece from Crikey on the whole affair: http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/05/28/when-online-media-outlets-pay-peanuts-they-get-monkeys/
Mike Beggs