so now artists have to not only be talented artists but also talented self promoters. i shudder for the future of art...
It used to be that in order to be a photographer you had to buy an expensive camera and have access to a darkroom, or at least spend money to get your photos developed. Now you can take high quality photos with your phone, that everyone has, and no development is needed. So more people than ever are taking photos, many of them artistic. There's no shortage of photography and unless civilization collapses, never will be. If anything, there'll be more and more photography every year, and sharing it has gotten easier than ever.
The same is even more true of video, which used to be even more expensive to create than photos, but now is just as easy and virtually free.
Same with desktop publishing ever since cheap personal printers became available. It used to be that you had to either own a printing press or pay to have someone print your work for you. Now you can print it yourself on your personal printer, or just put it up online, skipping the printing step.
Digital art creation programs have made creating visual art way more affordable, as now you don't have to pay for expensive physical art supplies.
Same with digital music creation tools, etc...
The many digital distribution platform, from Facebook, to Instagram, to Etsy, to Amazon have made publishing one's art super easy too. There's less need than ever for agents, publishers, or other middle men.
All together, this has led to an enormous amount of creativity and art creation, with probably hundreds of millions of people becoming creators compared to what existed just 40 years ago, before the personal computer revolution or the internet boom.
So I'm not worried in the least about art. There'll always be more than enough of it to go around.
I'd love it if creators got paid for their work, but it's not at all essential for art to live or thrive. More than enough artists will continue to make art regardless.
There's more art than ever, but yet the ability to have a legal protection in order to make money on your art is somehow a problem? How?
Meanwhile, there's no right to make money. It's an artificial scarcity model that mostly benefits corporations and middlemen along with a small minority of extremely popular artists, and once the artists die it doesn't even benefit them either but does continue to benefit corporations and middlemen.
If creators want to keep control of their work they shouldn't publish it at all, but once they do there should be no artificial legal framework to imprison people that copy or share it.
However, artists can still get paid by asking to be paid in advance through sites like patreon and kickstarter.
For the rest, they can remain hobbyists.. and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I said before, there's no shortage of art.
In the system I'm advocating for, no one gets sent to jail and no one's lives are getting ruined for copying or sharing bit, art continues to be made, and artists continue to get paid (though now in advance rather than a legally mandated system of artificial scarcity).
Outside a very tiny proportion of best sellers you need to expend significant efforts on promotion if the income matters to you.
This is not new, or unique to literature, and never has been.