I'm not saying that Zander publishing his work through Lulu rather than the conventional path is in any way inferior, at all, and I am very pleased that he has done it.
Gigs are not in the same comparison, there is no comparable activity for authors (unless they are so well known that someone will pay them to read their books out loud, not a common thing even for professional authors) and so are not relevant. The relevant comparison is recorded music and books, and there as I said there is a distinct similarity. The vast majority of recorded music generally available is via major record labels, and that is almost all of the music which the ordinary person will buy or even hear (possibly a couple of hundred out of a town of tens of thousands go to live gigs of independent musicians). They sell in millions, where independents sell in thousands or hundreds, often at gigs (which authors don't get; a market stall selling books is the equivalent not of a gig but of a market stall selling CDs).
As far as conventional distribution of hard-copy material is concerned, as far as I can see independent musicians are indeed badly treated. How many even have an Amazon presence, let alone any of the major stores?
Electronic distribution is yet another system, and there too there is a like-for-like comparison, but there the time factor comes into play. Lots of people have had MP3 players for ages but e-book readers are only just starting to become available at halfway reasonable prices whereas most people now seem to be able to use their phones to play music (some can read books on their phones as well, but the number of people who are happy with 4 or 5 words per line and often not even a whole sentence on the screen at once is not all that high). In spite of what the early adopters like to say the number of people who willingly read books on computer monitors and small screen handheld devices is still very small compared to the number who read actual books; this may change but that's the case at the moment. And even the phone e-book readers are quite new and there are a number of competing systems and formats, not all of which are compatible.
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Gigs are not in the same comparison, there is no comparable activity for authors (unless they are so well known that someone will pay them to read their books out loud, not a common thing even for professional authors) and so are not relevant. The relevant comparison is recorded music and books, and there as I said there is a distinct similarity. The vast majority of recorded music generally available is via major record labels, and that is almost all of the music which the ordinary person will buy or even hear (possibly a couple of hundred out of a town of tens of thousands go to live gigs of independent musicians). They sell in millions, where independents sell in thousands or hundreds, often at gigs (which authors don't get; a market stall selling books is the equivalent not of a gig but of a market stall selling CDs).
As far as conventional distribution of hard-copy material is concerned, as far as I can see independent musicians are indeed badly treated. How many even have an Amazon presence, let alone any of the major stores?
Electronic distribution is yet another system, and there too there is a like-for-like comparison, but there the time factor comes into play. Lots of people have had MP3 players for ages but e-book readers are only just starting to become available at halfway reasonable prices whereas most people now seem to be able to use their phones to play music (some can read books on their phones as well, but the number of people who are happy with 4 or 5 words per line and often not even a whole sentence on the screen at once is not all that high). In spite of what the early adopters like to say the number of people who willingly read books on computer monitors and small screen handheld devices is still very small compared to the number who read actual books; this may change but that's the case at the moment. And even the phone e-book readers are quite new and there are a number of competing systems and formats, not all of which are compatible.