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your thing. On the other hand, you succeeded as a mediocre player, provided you attacked your performance with a lot of brio. 
 
Radio was clearly good news for musicians -- lots more musicians were able to make lots more music, reaching lots more people and making lots more money. It turned performance into an industry, which is what happens when you add technology to art. But it was terrible news for charismatics. It put them out on the street, stuck them with flipping burgers and driving taxis. They knew it, too. Performers lobbied to have the Marconi radio banned, to send Marconi back to the drawing board, charged with inventing a radio they could charge admission to. \"We\'re charismatics, we do something as old and holy as the first story told before the first fire in the first cave. What right have you to insist that we should become mere clerks, working in an obscure back-room, leaving you to commune with our audiences on our behalf?\" 
 
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years later, Napster showed us that, as William Gibson noted, \"We may be at the end of the brief period during which it is possible to charge for recorded music.\" Surely we\'re at the end of the period where it\'s possible to exclude those who don\'t wish to pay. Every song released can be downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer network (and will shortly get easier to download, as hard-drive price/performance curves take us to a place where all the music ever recorded will fit on a disposable pocket-drive that you can just walk over to a friend\'s place and copy). 
 
But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording artists to reach a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your potential fans may be spread in a thin, even coat over the world, in a configuration that could never be cost-effective to reach with traditional marketing. But the Internet\'s ability to lower the costs for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to find artists suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever before. 
 
Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the live performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use your recordings -- which you can\'t control -- to drive admissions to your performances, which you can control. It\'s a model that\'s worked great for jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. It\'s also a model that won\'t work for many of today\'s artists; 70 years of evolutionary pressure has selected for artists who are more virtuoso than charismatic, artists optimized for recording-based income instead of performance-based income. \"How dare you tell us that we are to be trained monkeys, capering on a stage for your amusement? We\'re not charismatics, we\'re white-collar workers. We commune with our muses behind closed doors and deliver up our work product when it\'s done, through plastic, laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that we convert to a live-performance economy.\" 
 
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on MySpace -- who can fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of discs without a record deal, by connecting individually with fans -- have shown, there\'s a new market aborning on the Internet for music, one with fewer gatekeepers to creativity than ever before. 
 
That\'s the purpose of copyright, after all: to decentralize who gets to make art. Before copyright, we had patronage: you could make art if the Pope or the king liked the sound of it. That produced some damned pretty ceilings and frescos, but it wasn\'t until control of art was given over to the market -- by giving publishers a monopoly over the works they printed, starting with the Statute of Anne in 1710 -- that we saw the explosion of creativity that investment-based art could create. Industrialists weren\'t great arbiters of who could and couldn\'t make art, but they were better than the Pope. 
 
The Internet is enabling a further
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