Cutting Out the Middlemen.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Arts and the Internet

It's easier than ever for artists to reach audiences directly. But is that always a good thing?

It's a pretty safe bet that once Time magazine has taken note of a cultural trend or topic, it's on its last legs, if not totally over. After all, it took that earnest weekly until 1966 to finally pose the late 19th-century conversation-starter, "Is God Dead?"

Occasionally, however, Time stumbles onto something before it's completely yesterday's news. This spring, for instance, the magazine extolled the virtues of the vast increase in music, literature, video, and other forms of creative expression made possible by ever-cheaper and increasingly widespread technology. While hardly a new phenomenon, cultural proliferation will only continue to grow over the coming years. (See "All Culture, All the Time," April 1999.)

Time's take on the phenomenon was a March 27 cover story titled "Do-ItYourself.Com," illustrated with a picture of a grinning Stephen King reaching through a computer monitor toward the reader. "If [he] can do it, so can you," said the caption, alluding to the huge success of the horror author's Web-only novella Riding the Bullet. (King's fans downloaded more than 500,000 copies on the e-book's first day of availability in March, netting the author an estimated $450,000.) "Who needs Hollywood when you can make your own movies, books and music?" asked Time.

That's a fair--and highly relevant--question. It's also one that ranges far beyond purely cultural matters to include other sorts of information-based exchanges: Who needs Time, say, when you can assemble your own news magazine either by writing it yourself or, more likely, culling various Web sites and listservs for stories and discussions on topics that interest you?

Certainly in the cultural realm, it appears as though the Internet is finally delivering on what cyberspace pundits once touted as "disintermediation." That's a clunky way of saying that the Internet makes it easier for producers and consumers, sellers and buyers, and artists and audiences to find one another without having to go through--or pay off--a middleman. The ability to circumvent middlemen of one sort or another is at the heart of recording-industry anxieties--and hardball lawsuits--launched against companies such as MP3.com and Napster, both of which allow people to freely circulate music in previously unimaginable ways.

So far, most of the discussion, especially from artists' perspective, has focused on the...