This is a great piece, and it gets to the contradiction at the heart of the new trend/buzz around creative people using the Internet in various ways to make an end-run around traditional publishing infrastructure in all industries. It's the same with big-name authors ditching their publishers to self-publish on Amazon: Sure, they make a mint, more than they would have at a traditional publisher, but they wouldn't have been able to do it were it not for the fan base they built up with their traditionally published works.

Everyone loves to bash publisher/distributors in all areas of creative endevour, and often with good reason. But at their heart these companies are accumulations of capital and expertise that allow risky investment in creative works that might fail. Everyone who succeeds in the traditional world to the extent that they don't need the publishers anymore got there because that capital took a risk on them; now they don't want to let part of their profits go back into that capital pool. The question is, if the old system blows up, who takes that risk for unknowns?

I'm certainly not saying its impossible. Probably people will be ramping up creatively, writing/making music/what have you for nothing until they build up enough of a fan base to ask for something more. But crowdsourcing is definitely not just a free handout without huge accumulated goodwill.