How do artists get paid?

For various reasons I've been thinking about how an artist could get compensated for his or her work. Now that tipjoy.com has gone under, there's one less service available... though something like the PayPal micropayments that are used on our parent site could be nearly as good; other than reducing fees (which PayPal has effectively done in its own micropayments offering), I don't see much value in "aggregation services."

So what's the real problem? In general, I'm betting that people (let alone "average internet users") don't really like to pay for things that they already have. Granted, the iTunes store took MP3s out of the realm of "theft" and into the legitimate world of "purchase"... but, other than that, do we have an examples where people pull out their wallets to compensate someone for content that's freely available?

Of course, this is nothing new. The great art of hundreds of years ago was bought and paid for by a patron who wanted it... so maybe the only sustainable financial model is for free content to disappear and "subscription" (or even "pay-to-create") content will replace it? That's the way newspapers are going, right?

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