Here are links to two related articles on BoingBoing I saw today. They both touch on things I have been thinking about for quite a while. I suggest you read the original articles and the comments on both.

Kevin Kelly’s just posted “1000 True Fans,” a business plan for all kinds of creators in the twenty first century:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/04/howto-earn-an-artist.html

Mike Linksvayer, the CTO of Creative Commons, runs the numbers of Nine Inch Nails’s Creative Commons download experiment and discovers that it only took the band two days to exceed the typical net from a massive-selling traditional CD release.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/05/nine-inch-nails-made.html

I don’t agree with some of the sums in the NIN article, but it does underline the “True Fans” point of the first article.