The Pro-Am Long Tail thing

This might be getting a bit arcane, but I'm writing a piece about the Long Tail and how it might be about to open up opportunities for artists in a huge way. Here, Tom Abate, the MiniMediaGuy, talks about how the web is creating a generation of Pro-Am (Professional Amateur) artists.

I Heard S/he Sang a Good Song.

The 10 million people who earn some money from their creative works (for most it’s a sideline) are a subset of the 32 million who consider themselves artists or musicians but relegate creativity to a hobby.

That suggests to me that if a Web business could provide the tools or platforms to make money from art, this would induce some of those 22 million pure hobbyists to become creative moonlighters.

How exactly might that be done? Alas, I have more questions than answers, but here’s another market-friendly number for those in search of business models -- roughly 40 percent of artists order supplies or equipment online (a nice close to an ad sales pitch!).

There are other encouraging hints in the report that many artists, and even more musicians, already use the Web to chat with each other, reach out to fans, sell their works – and that they want to use it more. The report quotes one musician lamenting the absence of a site to facilitate easy distribution of MP3 downloads: “If there were a site where I could post and charge others for downloads, I’d use it.”