I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year thinking about privacy. Not just my own, but the right of everyone to protect their information. If you have something valuable, you need to make sure that others don’t get to use it without paying you for it.

It’s easy to argue that people should give up this right if they have something valuable. Certain people have too much power over other people’s lives, and yet we’ve given them the power to steal and exploit our most valuable things.

But I’m not convinced. I’m less concerned about theft than about the exploitation of talent, and I still think we can find ways to ensure that talented people get paid for their work.

I started writing about this because I was worried about an artist who is sitting on a big idea for a song. She’s got the music, and she’s got a compelling vision of what it should sound like, but she hasn’t yet figured out how to sell it or how much she can ask for.”

It is easy to be skeptical of technical challenges. It’s much harder to be skeptical of the people we hire to help us solve them. Yet it is often a good idea to take a step back and look at the people we hire, not just as objects of our service, but as potential agents of our own goals: their work should help us achieve them.

A lot of the time that doesn’t happen. A lot of designers are hired because they are pretty or because they have a track record. But sometimes it happens that you see a designer who has not only talent but a vision for something bigger than herself, who is committed to helping you achieve your goals even if that means sacrificing some things she wants for herself.

That’s what I found with two talented musicians on my team. When they started working with me, they were still sidestepping the traditional path of music careers and were making their living playing open mics in bars across the city. They didn’t make any money then, but they were already happy enough doing what they did, and I was happy when a couple months later one of them got an internship at Google and helped set up the company culture there.

But then both ended up getting offers from Google’s

In the summer of 2009, I found myself walking down the street in Chicago. I had a guitar in my hand, and was singing a few bars of an old blues standard that never fails to bring back memories from my childhood days in rural Mississippi.

I was singing when a guy walked up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You’re really good. You’ve got talent.”

He then asked me how long I’d been playing. When I told him about five years, he told me he knew someone who might be able to help me out:

“My friend has always wanted to form a band,” he said. “She’s written some songs herself, but she can’t quite sing them right.”

He told me that the woman might be able to help me because she was a songwriter herself. He then gave her name and number and asked if she’d like to meet up with me sometime. She agreed, and we made plans for lunch later in the week.

The woman’s name is Rosemary Harris, and she has written several songs over the past year or so that have gotten her much greater exposure than all her other work combined—a fact that you will understand when you read about how she did it below.

A year or two ago, a friend of mine made a side venture of playing music on the street. He was always open about it and never asked for money, but he was constantly approached by passersby, some of whom wanted to hire him to play at their wedding. This was not his intention, but once he realized people were asking him to perform for them, he stopped.

A couple of weeks later I met him while walking through the neighborhood. He told me that he had just been approached by an older woman who said she needed him to play at her son’s wedding. He declined.

Later that day, I saw that same woman on the sidewalk again and she offered him $20 to play at her son’s wedding. If he accepted she would pay him another $20 every time he played at her son’s wedding thereafter. The offer was made repeatedly and aggressively, with each new offer increasing slightly in value from the last.

I talked to my friend about it and we agreed that if someone offers you money for something you are already doing for free then you should feel guilty about accepting it. It is especially wrong if you feel like you’re being exploited because you have talent that others don’t have.

My friend did not feel like he was being

I remember the day I discovered how much musicians make. I was in a coffee shop with my friend Josh, and we were having coffee and I saw a guy playing guitar on the sidewalk. We asked him if we could hear him play, and he said he was playing for tips. Josh told him it was cool to play for tips, but that we couldn’t pay him because we didn’t have any money.

He said that he understood, but that he also wanted us to know that “I’m going to come back tomorrow, and next week, and maybe you’ll be getting paid by then.”

He was right. As of this writing, I’ve been getting paid every Tuesday for playing guitar on the street ever since.

The future of music is the Internet. Only on the Internet will it be possible for music to be widely and conveniently available, for a small price. If you buy a song on iTunes or Amazon, you’re getting a file that’s sold by Amazon and Apple. And if you go to Google Music, you’re often not getting the whole song but just a fraction of it.

But with music that’s actually “free” – like the music played at parties when people get together – there are no guarantees about who gets paid. Because of copyright and other laws, we have little control over what happens to our recordings once they leave our hands.

If you’ve ever made recordings on your computer and sent them somewhere else, you know how easy it is to accidentally click “send,” then find out that everything you’ve recorded suddenly belongs to someone else. When this happens, you’re stuck with them.

It’s even worse if your recordings contain something valuable: say, new ideas or lyrics or arrangements of other people’s songs. In most cases, all the copyright owner has to do is tell everyone in a certain circle of friends or acquaintances not to share the recording with anyone else. The entire world shuts up and plays nice until everyone finds out how much trouble she caused

We hear that musicians are poor, but we don’t know how poor. We can’t answer the question: How do you make a living as a musician? It’s not like a chef or a dentist.

How much does a musician get paid for a concert? Someone who tells us that usually doesn’t know either, because it varies so widely in different markets and even within markets. Is it more than $50,000? That’s what you get paid if you play Carnegie Hall. Is it less than $10,000? Then you probably don’t do enough shows to support yourself, unless you happen to be on American Idol.