"Make Money on the Internet" Ha ha. An NPR rumble about fishing...

As soon as the Internet arrived, so did spam and scams. How many times do you get e-mails saying you can MAKE MONEY and how many fucking Internet websites fail to remove those "I made $550 in my spare time" spams that appear in "comments" sections?

Just today a FARCEBOOK friend was yammering, yet again,about TSU, and how you can "MAKE MONEY FOR YOUR CONTENT." Yeah? Googling it, the first thing that comes up is "scam" and "waste of time." Coincidentally, there were sad realists who said, "Look, FARCEBOOK may be making money off your content, but NOBODY is going to pay to see your photos, or your YouTube links. It's not the antidote for FARCEBOOK."

How about the jerks who post links to the articles appearing at EXAMINER, and other "post your own content" vanity sites? The site looks real until you realize it's bullshit. The jerks get a few pennies and bragging rights to being "with the EXAMINER" or whatever. That ain't makin' money.

Here comes National Pubic Radio with a Pollyanna article about musicians making THOUSANDS of dollars selling their creative work.

The story continues on and on:

"I was kind of keeping an eye on my statements and my last statement I passed 250 million views online. Total," Collum says. "That's a significant number for an artist that no one really knows." Ironically, Collum says, he's never thought of himself as the kind of musician who plays weddings. But, it turns out they've been very lucrative for him.

In addition to the money Rumblefish collects from Animoto it also tracks views of videos. When any video gets enough views, YouTube monetizes it with ads. Musicians who own the song used in a video can claim part of that money; Rumblefish does the work of collecting for Collum.

Rumblefish also has deals with other sites similar to the one it has with Animoto. Shutterstock, which started as a photo licensing site, now does the same for tracks of music. Users pay a fee and they can use the track for an online ad for a local business or a corporate video. Rumblefish has a deal with GoPro, the portable video camera company. It has software where camera owners can post their action videos and put pre-licensed music under them.

Rumblefish was founded nearly 20 years ago before the Internet was everywhere. Paul Anthony Troiano was a music student at University of Oregon and he was putting himself through school by selling his music composition homework to a local TV station. "A professor called me in one day and said that he heard my music homework on TV and asked me why I didn't put the effort into writing the music myself," says Troiano. "He thought I'd just lifted it from the TV, but I'm like, 'No. I got paid 500 bucks for that. Isn't that great?'"

Troiano's professor didn't think so. Troiano was thrown out of the music program. But the University of Oregon's business school took him in and Troiano studied copyright and music rights there, and later founded Rumblefish to sort out all the owners of a piece of music. Just think of a band, he says: There's the songwriter, singer, bass player and so forth. Collaborators like producers often contribute to the songwriting process as well, and get a share of the credit.

"There's 28 people at the table for each of these songs," explains Troiano. "We figure out who all of them are and we organize that into tables in a database and we say, 'OK, now the song is ready to go 'cause we found everyone that owns every little disparate piece.'"

There are many other companies stepping into the market for licensing and tracking music online, says Casey Rae, the CEO of the Future of Music Coalition.

"There's a growing market for what you could probably call creative technology companies, meaning they're companies that are on the music side of the business," Rae says. "But they're using technology to solve some of the problems that have frustrated artists and writers for decades."

Rae thinks that after years of bad news about music piracy on the Internet cutting into sales, we may be about the enter a new era, one in which the music business becomes more global and the Internet actually brings in new areas of revenue for musicians rather than just killing the old ones.

And for music fans who might have felt a little bad about sharing and listening to music free — these new technologies may relieve a little guilt.

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I detest articles that focus on one freak case and decide breathlessly, THERE'S A NEW PARADIGM...THERE'S HOPE IN THE WORLD...YOU ARE SAVED...

There's always somebody sending me a piece on "A person who wrote an eBook and was shocked to find it in the Top Ten of Amazon's eBooks..." or "That woman who wrote Shades of Grey...." Exceptions to the rule.

Then there's good ol' YouTube, and people who say, "If you stay with it, if you keep posting new and exciting things, your channel will grow, and the royalties will come in..."

The only royalties that anyone can point to are dollops named George and Charlotte, who popped out of Kate's twat and are set for life. The fairy tale for everyone else ain't likely to come true.