Good question. I think I can best answer this by example:

People get paid to develop Blender. Blender even has an in house film studio, with paid artists. The software and artwork is made available for free. No artificial scarcity is imposed. And no one is starving.

Trying to emulate the restrictions of the material realm is the wrong direction.

It's a good example but I can't help feeling that we would end up with a much smaller ecosystem if that was how all software was funded.

I work in a very narrow niche selling B2B and my experience tells me it just wouldn't be viable if it was open source. I'd end up selling support which is not how I want to work.

I don't think comparing the Blender Foundation to an artist is fair. And Blender is a software widely used in the industry.

It is an example of how to think outside the constraints of scarcity when dealing with immaterial ”property”.

But if you are looking for individual artists there’s Patreon.

I’m sure people can think of reasons why Patreon does not fulfill some criteria which to them is important for a healthy artistic community. After all, people are imaginative. What I’m encouraging you to do is to use that imagination to think of ways to embrace digital abundance, instead of trying to shoehorn the property rights that humans constructed to distribute physical goods onto something inherently non-physical.

If humanity can not handle the virtually infinite supply of digital goods without artificially enforcing scarcity, what does that say about us?

> How does an artist get paid?

If you run a MLM scheme then you aren't an artist, you are a conman. NFT's is a solution to get conmen paid, it isn't a solution to get artists paid.

Not an universal solution, but you can get paid once by a person or a group to paint/draw/program/record what they want.

I see people showing of what they can do and then accepting requests on patreon, if the client shares the thing later is something is probable that will happen.