Where physical is the new scarcity

Artists who depend on selling recorded material in order to make a living are doomed.

That was the conclusion of Andrew Keen speaking at the end of the Art of Digital event in Liverpool last week.

Keen,the controversial author of the Cult of the Amateur,told an audience made up of mainly artistic people that the only ones that would survive were those that were funded by public money.

According to Keen,the old business model, which saw culture sold by record,book and film ie all recorded and founded on the model of mass production and distribution was finished.

The digitisation of culture had made it virtually unprotectable as in our post Napster world it is no longer practical to protect intellectual property on the web.

However two years on from writing his book,Keen is more optimistic about the future as our digital culture has created new scarcities which have an added value.

One is the physical in the live performance which will mean ironically that live music and cinema will continue to expand.The second is the scarcity of attention.Writers for example now earn more money from public speaking rather than publishing.