I understand what you are trying to say.
I am curious though what you recommend as a monetization strategy if you take that route?
I suppose ad revenue is always the old fall back, but I would imagine that for a lot of the content out there, that is not free to produce, there needs to be some way to pay the bills.
There's always the old standby: custom-made, one-off products.
A concert, for instance; lots of musicians make money through performance.
Depending on how crowd-pleasin' your creation is, or how well you've done at finding a crowd, there's a bit of tension possible; a husband who commissioned a Dali portrait of his wife ended up hanging it in his kennels to underscore what he thought of it.
Using the digital content as basically a loss leader for things that can't be distributed digitally, namely live performances and merch that you'd sell at those live performances.
It's artists also have a little success with digital 'busking' - where you intentionally deliver high quality content for free, along with a message that asks people to toss a few bucks your way if they think you're worth it.
The best written one I've ever seen was Benn Jordan's "Hello Downloader", which is included in all of his self-released torrents: http://www.alphabasic.com/Please_read.html
