Ali Lohan is a 14-year-old child who is related to Lindsay Lohan, a 22-year-old actress with a drug problem. And I think her story nicely captures everything good and promising about the contemporary world.

It's no secret that I'm generally opposed to children working professionally in the arts--I think it almost always tends to turn out poorly for the kids involved, and I don't think it helps the arts much either.

But, you say, Mary Shelley was a kid when she wrote Frankenstein! And fair enough. (She was 19). But let's not forget how bad Mary Shelley's other novels are--and I'm sorry, Shelley scholars, but they are--and let's also not forget that she died at 53 with her deceased husband's shrunken heart in one of her desk drawers. Not necessarily a life to emulate.

Right, but so anyway. There is very little to be gained in any long term way from kids working professionally in the arts (even if you're Lindsay Lohan; even if you're Christopher Paolini). But this is not why Ali Lohan's budding recording career portends the promising future of popular art in America.

Behold the first verse of Ali Lohan's debut single (I would worry that quoting this violates copyright law were it not so aggressively unoriginal as to presumably be uncopyrightable):

"Oh yeah
I should have known it was you all along
I didn't know what i had till it was gone
Now i'm fallin' down, fallin' down, fallin' down

And the trouble with the truth that you face
Is that you're haunted by all your mistakes."

It's possible that this song is intentionally bad, but I doubt it. That said, I know that a lot of songs have terrible lyrics. Debbie Gibson had terrible lyrics when I was a child; David Cassidy had terrible lyrics when my parents were young.

In fact, the recording industry spent its entire life looking for bands with poor lyrics and reasonably symmetrical faces that would appeal to a lowest common denominator audience, and that is precisely why they have floundered ever since a new model of art commerce began to emerge on the Internet. (In the new world, fewer people get rich but more people avoid poverty.) Ali Lohan may succeed (although I doubt it), but each successive Ali Lohan will succeed a little less than the last.

To whatever extent publishing follows in music's footsteps (focusing solely on blockbusters, celebrity, and the broadest, blandest work possible), our business faces precisely the same fate.

I mean, can you imagine a day when, say, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen publish a YA book about all the things that influenced them on their journey to becoming hilariously vapid unemployed college dropouts? Everyone would find that hilarious. People would say: "Those quaint, silly publishing companies. I feel bad for them." (Please prove me right, America. Please.)