4 ms·

The volume of people making money, and the amount of money made by people doing artistic endeavors on the internet, when compared to decades past is troublingly

The volume of people making money, and the amount of money made by people doing artistic endeavors on the internet, when compared to decades past is troublingly lower. I'm not sure what can be done, but I see an ever increasing number of people loosing benefits from, or loosing their careers entirely. This isn't all caused by tech, but also by a change in the social contract between companies and and their employees. The idea of you working hard for a company your whole life, and even if your didn't make great pay, you were secure in the idea that you would be taken care of and have a place to work until you got your send off party and a gold watch. When comparing what was to what is, from the perspective of security, safety, and prosperity of the worker, YouTube is barely on par with a freelance gig. And I fear that if our country doesn't address these sort of issue very soon, we are going to see suffering in the elderly not known in our country for the last century.

anilgulecha 8y ago
Playing devil's advocate - why 'troublingly' lower? A career in art isn't guaranteed, unless we reach a post-consumer utopia, where robots do all the work. Hence, there's a saturation point in how much art is needed to saturate the demand, in an interconnected, digital, global world. And those that are unable to fit into this saturated point have to find other ways of livelihood.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Perhaps they will learn through code via boot camps and take your job. And then would you have preferred that their discipline- a profession that was not destined to be automated away- have remained viable?
asah 8y ago
I'm not so sure: the internet has rewarded certain forms of art/craft over others (e.g. easily produced, low cost of goods sold) and it's given them a worldwide audience. As an example, where food was a poorly paid profession before, there's lots of people making lots of careers in every little aspect of food, because their audience see pictures/video online and either orders for delivery or visits in vacation.
rlonn 8y ago
>The volume of people making money, and the amount of money made by people doing artistic endeavors on the internet, when compared to decades past is troublingly lower. Would love to see some actual numbers here. My guess would've been that more people are making in aggregate more money off artistic endeavors on the internet, than in past decades. Look at the music industry, whose total value peaked and started falling, but is now back and has exceeded earlier peak, due to internet streaming. Diversity, meanwhile, seem bigger than ever. In the 80's you had a few mega stars raking in all the money whileas now there are millions of small producers each making small amounts. I don't buy this "troubled times" theory. The only trouble is the fact that a lot of former producers are getting replaced, but this is encouraging because if we're in the middle of a shift and the total market isn't shrinking it probably means there is more growth ahead.
- microtherion 8y ago
  > Look at the music industry, whose total value peaked and started falling, but is now back and has exceeded earlier peak Would you mind citing your data for this? What I've seen suggests the opposite: https://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2018 https://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2018 "Despite the recent uplift, revenues for 2017 are still only 68.4% of the market's peak in 1999." And as far as I can tell, that 68.4% is based on nominal revenue. Inflation adjusted it works out to 2017 revenues being less than 47% of 1999 revenues, if I calculated correctly.
  - Nullabillity 8y ago
    IFPI represents record labels, not musicians.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  My understanding always was that the music industry even in it's heyday only ever allowed a very small number of extremely popular artists to make a real living, everybody else made mostly nothing. The share of wealth extracted by creatives seems to me to be going up while the share extracted by gate keepers is going down. This can remain true even if the absolute size of the economy is still rising, so it can look like the rich are getting richer while the poor are also getting richer. Inequality is still rising, but the tide is lifting all boats.

anilgulecha 8y ago

Playing devil's advocate - why 'troublingly' lower? A career in art isn't guaranteed, unless we reach a post-consumer utopia, where robots do all the work. Hence, there's a saturation point in how much art is needed to saturate the demand, in an interconnected, digital, global world. And those that are unable to fit into this saturated point have to find other ways of livelihood.

Apocryphon 8y ago
Perhaps they will learn through code via boot camps and take your job. And then would you have preferred that their discipline- a profession that was not destined to be automated away- have remained viable?

asah 8y ago

I'm not so sure: the internet has rewarded certain forms of art/craft over others (e.g. easily produced, low cost of goods sold) and it's given them a worldwide audience. As an example, where food was a poorly paid profession before, there's lots of people making lots of careers in every little aspect of food, because their audience see pictures/video online and either orders for delivery or visits in vacation.

rlonn 8y ago

>The volume of people making money, and the amount of money made by people doing artistic endeavors on the internet, when compared to decades past is troublingly lower. Would love to see some actual numbers here. My guess would've been that more people are making in aggregate more money off artistic endeavors on the internet, than in past decades. Look at the music industry, whose total value peaked and started falling, but is now back and has exceeded earlier peak, due to internet streaming. Diversity, meanwhile, seem bigger than ever. In the 80's you had a few mega stars raking in all the money whileas now there are millions of small producers each making small amounts. I don't buy this "troubled times" theory. The only trouble is the fact that a lot of former producers are getting replaced, but this is encouraging because if we're in the middle of a shift and the total market isn't shrinking it probably means there is more growth ahead.

microtherion 8y ago
> Look at the music industry, whose total value peaked and started falling, but is now back and has exceeded earlier peak Would you mind citing your data for this? What I've seen suggests the opposite: https://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2018 https://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2018 "Despite the recent uplift, revenues for 2017 are still only 68.4% of the market's peak in 1999." And as far as I can tell, that 68.4% is based on nominal revenue. Inflation adjusted it works out to 2017 revenues being less than 47% of 1999 revenues, if I calculated correctly.
- Nullabillity 8y ago
  IFPI represents record labels, not musicians.
vinceguidry 8y ago
My understanding always was that the music industry even in it's heyday only ever allowed a very small number of extremely popular artists to make a real living, everybody else made mostly nothing. The share of wealth extracted by creatives seems to me to be going up while the share extracted by gate keepers is going down. This can remain true even if the absolute size of the economy is still rising, so it can look like the rich are getting richer while the poor are also getting richer. Inequality is still rising, but the tide is lifting all boats.