Mark's got a great piece in the new Yahoo! Internet Life about the underground camgirl economy where Amazon wishlist items are traded for skin:
Now meet Natalie. Or better yet, don't meet her, just buy her an RCA CC9370 AutoShot compact digital camcorder ($450). If you do, this 14-year-old girl from a small Kentucky town "will love you forever." Or so she says on the link from her site to her Amazon Wish List. (Hint: She'd probably settle for the book Girl Director: A How-To Guide for the First-Time, Flat-Broke Film & Video Maker.) But do it quick, because Natalie hasn't been having the best luck of late, judging from the nasty messages posted to her guestbook: "Did I mention that you're the 2nd ugliest girl I've seen in my life?" and "Your site SUCKS ass because of your f—ing brutal WISH list, you ain't even good-looking and yet you think people are just going to ship you that stuff?" Natalie isn't shy about how she feels about these tirades: "WAAAAAAAAAHHH people don't like me because I'm 14 and I don't know anything and I'm ugly and I have a huge Wish List and other people are stupid and I'm honest about wanting to whore my site!!! I'm a whore and you've hurt my feelings!
I was talking about this with my hosts in Denmark last night, weirdly enough. The Internet is putting pornographers out of business (witness the folding up of Penthouse), largely by connecting voyeurs and exhibitionists to have one-to-one relationships. While the wishlist-compensation phenom demonstrates that there's still money in porn, it suggests that there's not a lot of business left there. We got onto the subject while talking about musicians and P2P file-trading. Many music publishers are shutting down their Danish operations, folding up in the face of declining CD sales. One of my hosts wondered if music was becoming a commodity, but (to use the analogy), the camgirl phenom suggests the reverse: "old" porn was a commodity — one picture for 1,000,000 viewers; this is much closer to one-to-one "bespoke" production.
I don't know how musicians will make money in a P2P universe, but I think it's a mistake to assume that technological changes that harm the music industry necessarily harm musicians.
