Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Eat or starve.
For those of you who make it all the way down the page, I currently publish this blog under a Creative Commons license which means I can't earn any money from any of my pretty words here.
I was reading through The Register this morning and their mailbag on the debate on the usefulness of the CCL. One letter in particular struck me:
"The reality is that when you work your arse off to produce something, and nobody pays you for your effort, you're choices become, do what I love and starve or do something else and eat. I'd like to see the looks on the faces of these people if their employers decided not to pay them anything anymore. I wonder how many would keep working, and yet they expect artists of every sort to keep producing music, movies, books, paintings, or whatever for free for the benefit of everyone except themselves."
I think the choice is presented to all sorts of people (and not just random bloggers or wannabe musicians like myself). The skills that pay real money in the real world, 99% of the time, are not creative. You have bank tellers, cafeteria servers, and call center "customer service representatives". You have people selling magazines on the street. You have multi level marketers.
These people probably grew up with poetry, music or dance in their soul. They probably compose songs. Every Monday morning they wake up and put on a uniform and kill a little bit of themselves to earn eight pounds an hour. I'm rather lucky in that I work at something I feel reasonably good at, and something I'm reasonably interested in, and still be able to write, sing, play music in my hard-earned free time. So I still get to do what I love, and eat. Sounds good to me.
I was reading through The Register this morning and their mailbag on the debate on the usefulness of the CCL. One letter in particular struck me:
"The reality is that when you work your arse off to produce something, and nobody pays you for your effort, you're choices become, do what I love and starve or do something else and eat. I'd like to see the looks on the faces of these people if their employers decided not to pay them anything anymore. I wonder how many would keep working, and yet they expect artists of every sort to keep producing music, movies, books, paintings, or whatever for free for the benefit of everyone except themselves."
I think the choice is presented to all sorts of people (and not just random bloggers or wannabe musicians like myself). The skills that pay real money in the real world, 99% of the time, are not creative. You have bank tellers, cafeteria servers, and call center "customer service representatives". You have people selling magazines on the street. You have multi level marketers.
These people probably grew up with poetry, music or dance in their soul. They probably compose songs. Every Monday morning they wake up and put on a uniform and kill a little bit of themselves to earn eight pounds an hour. I'm rather lucky in that I work at something I feel reasonably good at, and something I'm reasonably interested in, and still be able to write, sing, play music in my hard-earned free time. So I still get to do what I love, and eat. Sounds good to me.
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