As the Internet continues to turn the entire world upside down (more or less), those of us in the creative arts have been left in particularly bipolar state, at once manic about the possibilities of essentially free distribution and depressed about the fact that it must come with a devaluation of our art.

As a musician, I am particularly sensitive to this fact. Since I'm not Lady Gaga (I'm still waiting on the millions of album sales and the sex change), I make pretty much nothing from my creative output. It's more of a hobby than anything else, even though I would love for it to be my main source of income.

If you want to be depressed about the state of the music industry, there are plenty of places to look and things to read. But if you want to be really unbelievably depressed about something you thought was cool before, check out this amazing infographic about how little musicians make from music online: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/.

It's a bit old and perhaps a little outdated in the details at this point, but it's pretty astounding. The most incredible figure is this: in order for a solo artist (yes, one person) to make a monthly minimum wage from his music, his album would have to be played 4,053,110 times on Spotify in a month.

Yes, 4,053,110 times.

For listeners, Spotify is a truly unbelievable -- free music, supported by minimal (though admittedly annoying) ads. For artists, it provides exposure but is, sadly, a nightmare financially.

Of course, artists can make money from other sources -- selling CDs, touring, etc., but the point is that most of the online business models (many of which are included in the infographic) pay virtually nothing.

So what does this mean for writing?

As creative economies move more and more toward being Internet-based, literature is a hold-out but no exception.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing a Word for Word-type production of Samantha Toh’s “Independence Day,” a short story that Literary Laundry featured in its first issue. If you haven’t read it, check it out here.

For the uninitiated, in a Word for Word performance, actors essentially turn a short story into an onstage drama. Every word from the story is spoken by the actors, even phrases like “she said” after quotations. The actors also play characters from the story and, naturally, act out the action.

I was excited to see “Independence Day” performed—I love the original story. Toh’s language resonates with me, and I do enjoy that particular plot. It also turned out that my friend Raine Hoover was playing Jakey, the main character who finds himself in yet another foster home.

As Jakey’s journey from timid boy to somewhat more experienced man unfolded onstage, I couldn’t help but reflect on fiction and what it “means” (to get all existential) for a written story to be enacted onstage.

My main thought was that, when spoken, language loses some of the power it has in writing. On paper, language can possess us. We can linger over words and phrases for as long as we please. One of the strengths of Toh’s writing is her breathtaking power of language, her superb comparisons and metaphors that have almost a cinematic quality. This language does indeed ask us to proceed slowly and delicately.

Consider, for example, the opening lines of the story:

She never touched me again. Not through the flannel sleeve against my shoulders or with her hands, bare and stretching the skin on my thigh saying, Son you got them scars like stars when it’s dark out.