It doesn’t matter what your business model is as a photographer. It matters what the customer’s buying model is.

The above bit of wisdom is by Guy Kawasaki, who is quoted in an interesting article on rethinking photography business models.

These days, just about the only way photographers can make a living is by shooting weddings. But brides are creatures of our modern age too and are balking at some of the more old-fashioned elements of the business. Scott Bourne writes:

Gone are the days when we can just send some negatives to the lab, order some cheap 8×10 prints, put them in a black folder, mark them up 400 percent and call it a day.

Instead, brides want everything done digitally. They want all the pictures taken during the ceremony burned onto a CD. They even want the unprocessed files so that they can Photoshop them on their own.

Photographers must adapt to what customers want in order to survive.

I see the same thing in the book publishing business. Customers have e-readers, wonderful devices that allow them to buy books instantly. They don’t believe that e-books should be as expensive as print. While publishers may resist, customers believe that e-books should be priced somewhere between free and $9.99.

Readers also don’t care who the publisher is. They talk about the new Stephen King not “Have you seen the St. Martin’s Press catalog?”

But publishers are sticking to their business model, of bringing out books slowly and pricing e-books sometimes even more expensively than their print equivalents. They won’t survive.

Instead, the publisher as middleman will dissipate as authors and readers find each other on Amazon and other e-bookstores.

Social Media Week has been going on this week in DC. One of the sessions was on open source culture. Derrick Ashong is on a mission to give away a million downloads of his music tracks.

How can you make money at that? You can’t. But the sad truth is that most musicians never see a dime from album sales. If you’re a new artist, it’s better to give your stuff away and make money from concerts. (Or, if you’re a rapper, from your clothing line.) But first you need an audience. Giving away music is a way to develop that audience, a model that is explained in Free by Chris Anderson.

In his talk, Derrick explained that the hardest thing to get was people’s attention. “I’ve never heard of you – why would I listen to your music?” Giving away music is a way to start the conversation, to hopefully turn the disinterested into fans.

Can you give away music and make a living? How do photographers adapt to a world of photos everywhere all the time? What does a writer have to do to connect with an online audience?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions yet because the traditional business models are changing, driven by advances in connectivity and consumer demands. But hanging onto the old will lead to irrelevance. Those that adapt to the wishes of consumers will succeed.

Washington in 1979 was a scarred metropolis just ten years removed from riots that had hollowed out the city. It was a grim time, with hundreds of buildings boarded up just blocks from the White House.

1979 was a tough year for the county too, as the Carter presidency ended in economic malaise and the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis.

In these dark times, however, some people saw opportunity. Artists and musicians saw empty houses that they could turn into art galleries and practice spaces. Rents were cheap because few people wanted to live in neighborhoods filled with junkies and prostitutes.

HARD ART DC 1979 by Lucian Perkins documents some of this fascinating story. It chronicles the nascent punk rock scene in Washington, featuring seminal bands such as Bad Brains.

Perkins, a Washington Post photographer a decade older than most of the participants, didn’t think much of the music. These thrashing young people were very different than the mellow hippiedom of his San Francisco home. His photos reflect more of an interest in the scene, which is what makes the photos so interesting. They take in the audience, as well as the musicians, which fits in perfectly with the democratic spirit of the punk movement, which didn’t distinguish between artists and audience. We’re all part of this thing…

tough economic times - sound familiar?

With a focus on the mosh pit as well as the men on stage, these aren’t conventional concert photos. They aren’t perfectly-lit band photos composed in some studio. Instead, his pictures are gritty black and white, with every drop of sweat and torn t-shirt visible. They capture fascinating period details of the era – old beer cans, military-style clothing, spiked hairstyles, chains and leather jackets.

A friend of mine said that the show was, “all about nostalgia.” Which is true. The photos Perkins took got a brief flurry of publicity at the time (though Bob Woodward didn’t believe that they were from Washington). Then the negatives were stored away, as the photojournalist went on to cover wars in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Iraq.

The photos were then rediscovered in 1995 by Lely Constantinople, who had been hired by Perkins to organize his archives. She recognized her boyfriend (now husband) Alec MacKaye in the photos. As Perkins explained, your view of images changes over the years. His photos of DC’s punk scene in 1979 look different today, as we know how much the city would change.

Was 1979 a historically unique time, the brief moment when the combination of young people and cheap rents made the arts possible in DC? At the packed gallery talk, veterans of the era seemed to think so. Perkins, slightly older, had a different opinion. Every generation looks down on those who come along after them, he explained. They were looking back with rose-colored glasses, dismissing the gentrified city of today which features amazing events like Artomatic, the Pink Line Project and the DC Shorts Film Festival. None of these happenings could’ve occurred in the half-abandoned Washington of the 1970s.

But what I like most about these photos, and the punk movement, it its “do it yourself” ethos. HARD ART DC 1979 captures the wild energy of people performing for the sheer joy of it, with no expectation of reward other than putting on a great show.

We could use more of this. The artists and musicians of 1979 recognized opportunity in places where everyone else only saw tragedy. Out of abandoned houses and forgotten neighborhoods, they created a musical scene that still resonates today.

They got on with it. They created art in spite of the times.

HARD ART DC 1979 runs until the end of the year at Civilian Arts Projects, 1019 7th Street NW. See the large prints in person and then go have a drink next door at Passenger.

I’ve done another interview for the Pink Line Project, this time with Julianne Brienza, Executive Director of the Capital Fringe Festival.

I met Julianne several years ago, when Fringe was just starting out. It’s amazing and inspiring to see how far she’s come. Fringe is definitely something that way too serious DC needs. As she describes in the interview, Washington is very much a city on the rise in terms of the arts.

With the advent of the Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader and the growing acceptance of e-books among readers and writers, it’s safe to say that we’ve reached what I’d call the Disintermediation Moment. This is the time when industries collapse, driven by changes in consumer behavior and expectations. Technology offers new solutions, eagerly adopted by ordinary people, but resisted by middlemen and gatekeepers who want to retain their status, control and income.

The music industry had its Disintermediation Moment with the advent of Napster. Once consumers discovered the power of acquiring individual songs, rather than whole albums, the days of the $16.99 album CD were doomed. Lawyers shut down Napster but could never put the genie back in the bottle. The music business, where “thieves and pimps run free,” according to Hunter S. Thompson, was forced to cut a deal with another rebel, Steve Jobs. An industry that once condemned the idea of “ripping” songs from CDs to computers has turned to iTunes to save their sliding profits.

Newspapers were early adopters of the web, launching some of the first web sites and online services, such as the Washington Post’s Digital Ink in 1994. Early efforts made the mistaken assumption that people would pay for content – despite being surrounded by a sea of free information. For more than a decade, newspapers have tried to use the web to support a business model (money from classified ads goes for reporters, buildings, paper, trucks) that’s been undercut by Craigslist and others. It would be better if they adapted to the medium like the Huffington Post or Politico.

Back in the 1980s, movie studios tried to stop the development of the VCR, arguing that the devices enable copyright infringement. Though they lost, they continued their efforts, athwart the flow of history, as they sued DVR makers, as if they had learned nothing. Meanwhile, consumers have moved on, and watch clips and whole movies online.

And now it’s the turn of the book industry.

I’ve been reading a lot about e-books and the Nook, both as an avid reader and an author. I wrote a book, Murder in Ocean Hall, have an agent and am looking for publisher.

However, I also work on web sites for a living so the slow print publishing world seems really outdated to me. Why does it take a year for a book to go from an author to a bookstore? I could publish my book on Lulu and start selling it immediately.

Why are there so many gatekeepers involved? Why do writers get such a small (10%) royalty on their titles? Why do so many writers have to do their own marketing, despite the fact that publishers claim that’s what they’re for?

The argument seems to be that this is the way we’ve always done it. The book publishing world seems little changed, a Mad Men environment of stacks of manuscripts, Manhattan offices and boozy lunches. I would love a noontime martini but like the manual typewriters and flirtatious secretaries of Sterling Cooper, that world is long gone.

The price of e-books today is subsidized by Amazon and others. Publishers would like to charge much, much more than the standard $9.99 for e-books, arguing that they have high costs. This makes no sense – when you have perfect, unlimited digital copies of something, the price has to come down, as anyone who’s bought an album or song on iTunes knows. Consumers are saying that e-books should be comparable in price to paperbacks. That’s what its worth to them and book publishers need to adapt if they’re going to survive.

The fact that the publishing industry takes such a big chunk of the price of a book really seems like an argument against it. If so much of the cost of a title pays for execs and marketing campaigns, then why have a publishing industry at all? How is this model any different from the music, film and newspaper industries – all middlemen and gatekeepers have been rendered irrelevant by the Internet.

Without such high costs, books would be cheaper for readers and writers would make more money. My thoughts were really crystallized by this wonderful blog post by Joe Konrath. In it, he breaks down the amount of money he makes off e-books he sells through his publisher and those he sells on his own. He gets more money from titles he sells himself. And readers get more works to chose from and at a cheaper price. Konrath is meeting the demand of the market and making a better living than he would if he used a book publisher.

What value do book publishers add then? Are they not just standing in the way of more books at lower prices for more readers?

Ted Leonsis, rich with AOL money has been plowing his considerable fortune into the documentary business.  Today, he launched a new web site called SnagFilms that allows you to watch great documentaries for free online. One of the first docs available is DIG! This should be required watching for anyone who thought it would be cool to be in a band. It follows the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre as they fight it out for indie music success. One band makes it, the other collapses into drug-fueled insanity. And while it may not be pretty, both bands created some great music.

Leonsis has always been tech-savvy and his site features tools that allow you to easily embed links to your favorite docs, whether you’re on Myspace, Facebook, iGoogle, Blogger or have your own web site.  Like so: