Reading about Muxtape, a web service that was shut down before I had even time to start caring about it, and the kind of major label legal mumbo jumbo that Justin describes which inevitably came with the rising popularity of his site, I once again got this gut feeling, that went like “selling music is wrong”. At the same time, I recall that one quote from one of these GEMA (German RIAA) guys commenting on people with an opinion like me, saying essentially that one day, we will grow up and realize we have to earn money too.

I also remember a former colleague of mine who used to say something like “if you don’t believe in communism when you are young, you have no heart. If you still believe in it when you are old, you have no sense of reason.”

Sentences like these make me doubt my gut feeling, and yet it is there. You could think that I was raised with this belief, that artistic expression thrives best if it remains independent of business interests, but on the other hand, my mother makes a living from selling copies of radio plays and performing children theater. Her interest in arts always paralleled with an interest in capitalizing on it in order to survive.

But there is more to it. A recent study I read proved how people seem to value things higher that they payed money for. If the same product was given to them for free, they wouldn’t value it as much as when they had payed for it. The higher the price was, the more comfortable people felt with assigning properties of value to the goods.

This means that subjective judgment of value is not only dependent on quality, but also of the price we put on it. Although I would like this not to be true, I still have no trouble believing this, as I noticed these observations on myself. It would confuse me if you didn’t.

Other people become confused when an object has obvious traits of quality and well exercised craft, but yet is available for free. People have commented on my music more than once: “you should find a label and sell this stuff.” I used to be repelled by that thought, as I always felt that it would in some way restrict my artistic freedom, but now that I am in the downward spiral of steady employment, I realize that it is that alienating work which steals my time and restricts my artistic freedom.

Eight hours a day I keep working on someone else’s artistic vision that is primarily driven by economic interest. No matter what job you are in, I am sure you can agree with me on the opinion that there is little wiggle room within the narrow constraints of what we are supposed to do - unless we get To Decide(tm).

If I were to work by myself, even if I was constrained by, say, just being one guy doing everything, I would still have total control on how my ideas were to be acted out. So if I had these eight hours for myself, to work on my own stuff, and make a living out of that, I would have to switch the constraint of superiors-telling-me-what-to-do for the constraint of customers-buying-what-they-like. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

Instead of desperately trying to make something good out of the half-baked second hand ideas of my benefactors, dissatisfying, although with guaranteed income, I would be desperately pushing out all kinds of drawings, tracks, stories, trying to find a share of “people who care”, a share large enough to help my family and me live on more than a can of ravioli a day.

In my case, I am overwhelmed by a cornucopia of ideas (finally I get to use that word!) every day, a capability perhaps related to my adolescent drug abuse (but perhaps drug abuse was just another one of these ideas?), with a strong urge to care for what I am working on and a bothersome tendency to see the big picture, in other words: every executives nightmare.

Executives are just saying that they value people like me. The truth is that people like me stage an annoyance in their big self-realization dream, which, for odd reasons, includes the power to tell other people what to do. Often enough, we don’t come to them because we really love what they are doing. They are bribing us to help them live in an illusion of grandeur.

You are a happy guy if you can say “Well, what I’m doing ain’t that bad. After all, we’re popular, we make money” and stay with that. But if you are obsessed with quality, if you are trying to be better and greater than you can possibly be, to such an extent that the registration office calls you and offers you to change your middle name to “perpetually frustrated by ambitions”, doing daily chores for no matter what kind of company isn’t going to satisfy you in the long run.

Maybe this is only a German problem. Please let me know if I’m right.

So it seems, freedom of expression is always in some way dependent on funding, if your work is supposed to take off. Until even a century ago it used to be a wealthy patron who made art happen. These days, all hope rests on the “gray mass” patron of the internet. Everyone of you could be a “pocket money patron”.

How can we find an art funding concept that works more reliable than donations and isn’t as product centric as trade? In what ways would you people be willing to pay for art? I’m looking forward to your input.