I have long felt this way about movies, books, and music. I don’t have data to back it up, but it feels like there was a lot more quality, middle-budget content in the arts a few decades ago, vs. recent years in which everything seems to be a blockbuster or a flop. People dream of striking it rich, not of making a respectable living. It’s like startup culture has infiltrated nearly everything; if it’s not going to make you a billionaire, it’s not worth spending time on.
Some recent exceptions that make me feel hope for the middle class of the arts: Etsy, Netflix & Hulu, the world of podcasting. In all three of these places you can see people trying out ideas and making a living. It’s true that the businesses themselves – Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Amazon, etc. – are decidedly not middle class, the content creators on their platforms seem to be. (I can’t think of equivalents in books or music... SoundCloud? I got nothing for books.)
It's an issue with engagement culture, more than startup culture I think... All the big players in media nowadays are fighting for a piece of your attention. The consequence is that the public is forced to filter way more who gets to have their free time, and make the conscious choice of checking out old preferences way less.
I remember years ago it was a usual thing for me to find myself bored and start checking out authors I liked (writers, singers, movie directors, whatever). I'd then find out what they've been up to and check out their new stuff. Nowadays I very rarely do that, because I always have an ever increasing pile of media to consume I can barely keep up with, so I don't go out to find new things.
In such an environment an artist can't choose to build an audience very slowly over decades because there's no retention. The only way to succeed is to explode virally and then keep pushing content constantly to remind people of your existence for as long as you can surf the wave.
I'm kinda the opposite. Modern music (to me) seems to be largely consisting of artists who cannot sing and have no tone to their voice, relying excessively on autotune and copious amounts of other digital tweaking of their voices. Playing any instrument other than a guitar seems to have vanished. Sadly, nobody plays a trumpet anymore (see Chicago and Herb Alpert). No synthesized horn sounds remotely like a trumpet and a skilled blower.
So I go back to artists that were great in the 60s and 70s and look for other albums of theirs - found a lot of stuff I really like that way.
Somewhere in the late 90s to early 2000s, physical appearance was more important than actual talent for performing artists. The 70s and 80s had a fairly large amount of "ugly" artists.
The other thing is that what indie creators do now is different from what they used to. Blogs, Instagrams, YouTube clips, tweets, apps, games, etc. Making a whole movie, writing a whole book, nobody takes time to consume those things anymore, much less produce them.
Are they? I can't make it through a whole movie anymore, while I used to hit theaters at least once a week. Though maybe it is because of the lack of independent content, so a vicious cycle. Or maybe the streaming thing makes it too easy not to commit to the movie. Or maybe there is just so much selection that how do you even choose. Or, maybe I'm just getting old.
Maybe it's because we've seen these movies before. For example, the revenge movie. Such as Peppermint, with a totally by-the-numbers plot. The twist is this time it's a female lead, but she could have been swapped out for Bronson/Lundgren/Stallone/Schwarzenegger/etc without changing a scene or a line of dialog and it would have been exactly the same :-/
Then I watched "The Foreigner", yup, same old revenge plot.
>Are they? I can't make it through a whole movie anymore, while I used to hit theaters at least once a week.
It's not theaters, between Netflix and piracy, there are tons of more movies consumed. And whole TV-series, binge watched series by series, each of which amounts to 5+ movies running time...
I guess he's referring to the length of a single episode but, in a world of streaming, that seems a little arbitrary. At home, nothing keeping you from pausing a film halfway and picking up the next day just like a TV series. Obviously telling a single story in 90-180 minutes is a different form from telling a storing over multiple seasons of 30-90 minute episodes in different from a miniseries or single-season series. But they're all just artistic (and financial) choices.
While there's arguably been an overall shift to shorter content, I don't really see a marked falloff in movies being produced.
Book sales continue to decline in both physical and ebook format. I don't know if this is because people are reading less or because more piracy is occurring. On the other hand the sales of audiobooks continues to rise. At this point I think to have solid sales for a book it is almost a requirement to release an audiobook version. Unfortunately certain subject material doesn't work well as an audiobook (like most programming books).
I can only speak for myself, but for the past 10 years, audiobooks have been golden! I don't have time to read a book and nor do I want to. For example lying in bed with the light on parsing text, or sitting in a chair. It is boring when I could be resting my eyes in the dark and unwinding or even of late, I have been trying to make a wooden model of a boat. I still get to enjoy the benefits of a book passively.
Forgive my slow response! I think it just comes down to background noise. For example, people every day listen to Radio when driving, or have the news on in the background.
I don't think I could study something difficult with Audio Books or any noise, but for example, tinkering or life's chores like washing clothes, emptying dishwashers, hoovering, showering.... These tasks which must be done anyway can become secondary to an audio book which takes the prime brain space to the point that those tasks become "enjoyable". Especially if you find a good book!
Having grown up in LA, I think I agree with you. In the 80s and 90s I knew a lot of people whose parents were involved with entertainment, and they weren't mega rich. They were middle class or upper middle class. They had consistent work at good wages, and they worked on films with small budgets that were in the theater for a week or two, which was long enough to make back their budget but not much more.
A lot of those people work on small budget stuff for Hulu and Netflix now (as you point out). I think the big streamers have replaced the big studios as far as funding small budget work (single digit millions budgets).
I think you slightly misunderstand the the phenomena. There is simply a glut of content. The tools to make content have been so democratized that anyone can easily make good entertainment.
In the days of very expensive post production equipment or studio recording equipment the cheap stuff simply could not exist. The blockbusters and middling content were sorted/binned accordingly. Blockbusters were milked and middling content was salvaged and polished.
These days are indeed different. There's so much content. "Middle class" most likely has to come up from the bottom instead of failed blockbusters thrown to newbies and fixers. Advertising goes a long way and gems in the rough don't get that. However, there's almost certainly more good content than ever before.
In part, globalization is a limiting function on what makes sense to invest in. We do have data that says we make fewer comedies than we used to (they account for far less of the revenue percentage as well) and the reason is, in part, that comedies don’t translate well. The last 10 or so years has been dire for the genre.
There are other reasons too but it’s no wonder that studios are most interested in investing in movies that will have broad international appeal.
We have an abundance of new media. Making music went from needing a studio and finding a record label to needing nothing but a PC or even just smartphone and you can upload it to youtube or 50 other services.
Video is trivial as well though movies still take more effort than most are willing to put in but even so, the number of new movies or TV shows per year is way way up AFAICT.
Games is insane when you add in smartphones. Just like videos, games got easier to make. There are ~20k new games a month on smartphones. Sure, a game like GTA5 or Cyberpunk 2077 takes 400+ people multiple years, but just like video, documentaries that used to take a larger team of people are now regularly created by individuals and uploaded to youtube. Same with games. Lots of great indie games created by 1-4 people in 3 to 9 months. Especially with Unity and Unreal.
Hanging around on Reddit's /r/fantasy, I see a surprising number of people talking positively about self-published fantasy books. The coupled I tried reading—stellar Goodreads ratings aside—were utter garbage, but I bet there are some that are much better. Seems like some of these books (including the ones I disliked) are enough to earn the authors a living. Fantasy is a genre well-suited for series, so once you have an initial audience, you can rely on some level of recurring revenue for each subsequent book.
Publishing a book like this seems way more attainable than getting even a low level of success through traditional publishing a couple decades back.
This may go beyond the arts, as it appears everyone wants to strike it rich and quick. I did not get the same sense when I started my working career 30 years ago. Most of us just wanted to do some interesting work. Now, getting rich seems to dominate thinking.
You hear different views of the cause of this, but may see increasing inequality as a cause. I'm convinced extreme financialization from money debasement is the primary undiagnosed issue.
I grew up in the 70s. I read lots of books about how people got rich and quite definitely wanted to do my own startup and make pots of money.
One difference is that people in those days simply did not know how to go about entrepreneurship, or thought it required some magical skills they didn't have. That's all changed because the info is so readily available on the internet.
I thought about Amazon for self publishing, and that’s a good point. I could be wrong (and would be happy to be wrong), but it feels like most of the people in the making-a-living-but-not-striking-it-rich group there are turning out high-volume junk. When I think of the “middle class” of the arts, I think of the Duplass Brothers, for example, or the Blumhouse horror studio, where their goal seems to be to allow talented artists to experiment and make quality, if low-budget, media. My very possibly wrong impression of Amazon self publishers is that their success strategy is to churn out as much serialized content as fast as possible.
The reality is that making a comfortable five USD figures annually by publishing books whether self-publishing or going through a traditional publisher probably puts you at the very top of the curve.
Yes, and I assume at least some of the more successful self-published authors on Amazon are churning out material they can create a lot of quickly. I also assume they do a lot of marketing and have a reliable fan base in most cases.
Of course, the fact that it's easy to publish on those platforms doesn't mean it's easy to make more than beer money on them. (And, truth be told, even a publishing contract for a book often doesn't mean you'll make a significant sum of money.)
My experience in the tech industry writing tech-ish books is that they've been very good for my career. Also. The direct money I've made from them has been a rounding error even though the one I've done through a publisher was apparently successful enough they asked me to do a new edition.
Its not just arts. Its a winner take all in most industries globally now. Lots of huge corps dominate everything, not many local or even regional businesses.
Arguably, the middle class was the result of economic friction. If there are no barriers to scale, eventually there are a small number of big winners.
Historically, distance was a big source of economic friction. This make local retailing and manufacturing a profitable enterprise. As shipping became cheaper and more reliable, local retailing and manufacturing became economically impractical.
Another source of economic friction that generated a middle class was the need for a large number of middle managers and clerical staff to operate a large enterprise. This had two effects. One, it employed large numbers of people. Two, the cost of operating the organization scaled faster than linearly, and this prevented organizations from scaling to planetary scale. Computers have eliminated both those obstacles.
Perhaps the middle class was merely an artifact of the period between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, and is now gone forever.
A middle class is a political choice. The post war rise of the middle class was because of conscious policy choices made by the architects of the new deal and their successors.
The policies that supported the middle class have just been slowly undone in the wake of the Reagan “Revolution”
> If there are no barriers to scale, eventually there are a small number of big winners.
There is technically no contradiction between the existence of a middle class and the existence of a small number of big winners.
> Perhaps the middle class was merely an artifact of the period between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, and is now gone forever.
are software engineers the upper class then or are they part of the proletariat? What about doctors and lawyers?
Perhaps part of a new breed of middle class. Instead of a distance or management friction, this is a scaling friction. In order to scale, programmers are required. Maybe this correlates with doctors and lawyers, albeit a different friction, one of artificial scarcity (limits to who can attend medical/law school, and whatever certification is required afterwards).
Historically, the upper class was a class of rentiers who didn't have to "work" as such. Programmers would rather be part of the same class as rich merchants in the past.
Well... I think the modern sense of the term "middle class" is a purely modern invention.
As far as I'm aware, the historical "middle class" was never conceived of as being in the "middle" economically. They were the middle class because they were rich like aristocrats, without being nobly born like aristocrats. That put them in the middle of no scales of status; rather, they pegged the high end of economic status, and the low end of blueblood status. They couldn't be treated as well as noblemen, because (1) they weren't noblemen, and (2) everybody hated them. But they couldn't be treated as poorly as peasants, because they were too rich.
I don't see what we gain by applying this term to the majority of the United States today; the concepts just don't match up.
The article fails to account an important fundamental fact: attention is rivalrous and time is scarce. We don't want to settle for mediocre content or muddle through mediocre search results. If searching fails us, we will use side channels like sharing, and the accrual of readership may self-sort into the same aggregation patterns anyway. Or, move to a new platform.
If a platform wants to steer me towards things I may not know about to help me discover previously unknown content I may well be interested in, that's one thing. But I don't want a platform to "spread the wealth" by steering me to less interesting stuff because it's good for the platform or just "fairer."
Sorry citizen, Game of Thrones has reached its download limit. May we suggest The Wheel of Time of Sword of Truth instead? Quite the dystopia you paint.
More importantly I wanted to watch Walking Dead and Game of Thrones not on their own merit but preciously because they entered some kind of cultural flashpoint where all the people I cared about were watching these things. It was more important to me to be able to talk to them about the show we were watching than it was for me to enjoy the content. It’s the same for the music I chose when I was young (in my old age music had become background noise, something 15 year old me never would have believed). I am willing to bet this phenomenon both already has a name and is majorly responsible for the power laws we see in content creation domains.
We all benefit from variety when looking for something specific.
As an example, I play accordion and I like to hear other accordion play songs on YouTube. There may be lots of covers of a popular song I want to learn, but there are rarely many accordion covers, let alone good ones.
So the question is whether you are looking for generic entertainment, or do you take an interest in something specific? Add another search term to a query and the results can thin out pretty quick.
From a professional creator’s point of view (not me), the question is whether these niches have enough money in them to get started and grow from there? And that depends on market conditions. Can people find what they like when it’s not mainstream?
If you are YouTube, would you rather show joe schmo visitor a suggestion for accordion covers or a Cardi B video? Odds are they’re more likely to watch (and repeat watch) and share the latter.
So it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Unless accordion covers go viral on its own, it’s probably not going to break out. But if it did then YouTube would add fuel to the fire as long as people are responding
if I can ask something specific to an accordian player, I fell in love with a band called Swap. swedish fiddles with British guitar and accordian. do you recommend anything like it?
Well, not really. There are a lot of folk genres that use accordion and I'm unfamiliar with most of them, which makes exploring interesting. Swåp is new to me. That's like Celtic music I guess? But I've listened to some of Karen Tweed's videos before.
If the only strategy were to focus more attention on mediocre content, that would be a problem. Hence the second strategy, "serve heterogeneity in user preferences & empower niche."
E.g. I'm subscribed to a bunch of obscure, specialized subreddits that would be deadly boring to most people. But my reddit is far more interesting to me than the reddit I see when I'm not logged in, where posts have thousands of upvotes instead of dozens.
I think it’s worth noting that popularity isn’t always deterministic or meritocratic.
I once read about an experiment where users would listen to music and and the platform counted the number of listens and showed users. When the experiment was rerun, a different set of songs from the first experiment were popular. I believe I read this in Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger.
The point is that most content platforms select for content that is sufficiently good (or clickable) but not necessarily the best.
>most content platforms select for content that is sufficiently good (or clickable) but not necessarily the best
Best is in the eye of the beholder anyway. But, truth be told, as long as an algorithm is reasonably dialed into my genre preferences... (There are some genres I just don't like even if you show me the very cream of the crop. And there are less popular ones that I'll probably enjoy even Tier 2 performers well enough.) I'll be pretty well satisfied with the overall most popular songs in those genres. Will it hit all my favorites. No. But it wouldn't be a bad cut.
But I think search results are largely mediocre, aren't they? Search tends to favor content which is acceptable to everyone vs what's transcendent to any particular individual.
I actually think this has gotten quite a bit worse thanks to algorithmic content recommendations. For instance, when Pandora launched with hand-curated content, the recommendations were a lot better than I currently get with spotify.
That may be your experience, but sadly the average person likes the average content. It might be simply because they want to see and hear what's popular.
Quite a flawed article. To think you can shape people's watching behavior towards second-rate content is to be confused about how people actually spend their scarce time. Sure, people can use help finding things they like, but how were these large yet new creators discovered in the first place? Clearly there are mechanisms for rising to the top in each category... but perhaps there is just too much stickiness at the top?
Realistically, the largest creators are the most valuable to the places where content is consumed, so it's in the platforms' interest to keep them big and keep them being watched. These means less burden on content review. If 90% of view time goes to 1% of producers, content review a challenge. If 90% of views go to 10% of producers, now content review is a disaster. This "brand-safe" content is taken extremely seriously right now and it's not the time platforms will do anything except double down on this.
I disagree with this, mainly because it is the recommendation algorithms that have a huge impact on who rockets to the top, and those algorithms pretty much by definition will have some type of bias, so why not bias them to a more equitable distribution of views and revenue?
For a good example, see this video by "How to Cook That" author that laments how all the content farms around baking have gamed YouTube's algorithm so that real bakers (who show recipes that actually work) have been pushed out by content farms showing eye candy on loops with impossible recipes: https://youtu.be/6abePkXncCM
And in the music business - and probably also the movie business, and to some extent the writing business - there's been a strong subculture of payola and industrial promotion.
The major labels hire pluggers - as they're known - who used to deal with radio DJs and now deal with playlist curators.
Sometimes money changes hands and marketable but otherwise not very interesting music suddenly appears on hundreds of playlists - in the hope that it will break through into mass appeal.
You can only push this so far because ultimately listeners still decide what's hot and what isn't. But they're forced to make their choices from a limited and crafted pool of suspected high-performing product, and not from a much wider pool of more varied styles and less homogenous artists.
Someone above brought up a very good point that YouTube really only has to do content reviews on videos that get watched. It's cheaper for YouTube for everyone to watch the same 30 videos than it is to spread those out, because then they have to brand safety reviews on each video.
There's also going to be pushback from creators (and especially large creators) when they find out that YouTube is adding backpressure to their success. It's going to mean the algo helps you get some level of popular, and then it fights you getting really popular.
> For a good example, see this video by "How to Cook That" author that laments how all the content farms around baking have gamed YouTube's algorithm so that real bakers (who show recipes that actually work) have been pushed out by content farms showing eye candy on loops with impossible recipes
That author is misunderstanding the market. I know a lot of people who watch those; they have 0 intentions of actually cooking the things they see. To them it's closer to art than it is cooking, where they appreciate the end result and don't really care how the creator got there. I don't know why it doesn't seem obvious from the format. Those quick clips are an awful way to give cooking instructions, and they give none of the usual tips like "when you're done whipping, it should have the texture of...".
I think the style is inherited from Pinterest, where people constantly pin things they have no intention of actually doing. I had an ex that loved Pinterest, but her whole feed was pretty much just "Here's 1,000 things you don't have time to do unless you're a professional creator".
'confused about how people actually spend their scarce time'
Nothing in your post back this up with experience or some data
But the bigger problem is that you have a circular argument - you already assumed spme content is second-rate before anyone has viewed it or reviwed it. Sony's 23'rd remake of spiderman and endless marvel movies are allegendly first-rate content, despite having zero emotinal intelligence, relevant issues or plot.
Meanwhile there is probably some great plotwriting languising somewhere, waiting to be discovered
They’re first rate in the sense that they spend first rate money on it.
The major issue WRT Hollywood is that everyone is playing it mega safe, fixating on a genre or niche for years before changing tack. Before superheroes we had zombies, rom-coms, 3D, to name a few. Superheroes is mostly only notable because it has made so much money for such a long time, but it will eventually peter out; I’m not the only person I know who thinks there are too many supe movies to catch up with.
>"They’re first rate in the sense that they spend first rate money on it."
If this is your metric, they you are creating a world where the biggest players are guaranteed to succeed, and upstarts are guaranteed to fail. This is some serious perversion of both free market and of equality of opportunity, and creates massive potebtial for corruption
This is the quintessential middle-brow dismissal. Sure, what the article is proposing is hard, platforms have to think hard about how to make it work, however I think it successfully makes the case that this would be mutually beneficial for creators and platform robustness, and lays out some potential mechanisms to move in that direction.
Your comment, by contrast, hinges on the assumption that platforms today are perfect at elevating the best content, and everything else is second-rate.
The content platforms are designed to sell ads so they focus on engagement and yes they are very good at doing that. The "best" content is not usually the most engaging. The popularity of Qanon crap and commentary on Qanon crap is evidence of engagement being promoted over quality to the platform's advantage.
QAnon is carefully and cynically designed to be engaging. It's a package of shock-value emotional hooks known to be sticky with low-information voters who slant towards moral narcissism and authoritarianism.
The arts have to work harder. There are certain stock tropes and narratives musicians and movie producers can draw on, with varying degrees of deliberate awareness. But the target demographics are more varied, and some are even mutable. So it's harder to hit the bullseye with any consistency.
'The missing creator middle class' is funny because so many of these creators come from the middle class in the first place! That's because middle class teens have the time to make videos, not needing part-time jobs, and have the money to buy good cameras to record with, nice homes to record in, and holidays to glamorous locations to vlog about
There was a debate recently about how working class people are underrepresented and it's all middle class children at private schools and teens at elite universities.
That definitely seems to be the case for the YouTubers my daughter is interested in - they're very nice people but they are a bit relentlessly middle class.
Any discussion of middle class should start by defining middle class. Otherwise, it always seems pointless since no one is talking about the same thing.
> In our analysis, “middle-income” Americans are adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median, after incomes have been adjusted for household size.
And they seem to use "middle-income" and "middle-class" interchangeably.
Note that this definition is quite different than what may have been used in your history/economics classes in school/college.
Example: 18/20 active Youtube indie musicians that I looked at with more than 100,000 subscribers in one Gen Z demographic are middle-class/wealthy. All have gone full-time in music, even if they finished a non-music university degree.
But the remaining two have the most talent, and will do fine regardless of finances. Because killing it. :)
She's got it all wrong about the music business. It used to be that artists made most of their money from records. They toured merely to create more fans that would buy their music.
Now it's flipped 180 degrees. Musicians make all their money from touring. They release records to find new fans who will buy tickets to their shows.
We live in a golden era for the little guy. Before the Internet if you didn't own the means of production no matter how talented you might be you made money for those who did.
Now you can start a SaaS company and bootstrap your way into a living because the means of production have become ridiculously cheap. A musician can release music on the Internet and go from a local following to a regional one and if they're good enough a national one.
I well remember it taking Bob Seger ten years to go from a Detroit artist to a regional success and another ten years until he was 'discovered' and overnight became a national one. Bruce Springsteen did it faster because he was on the east coast and got a Time magazine cover.
The only difference now is that the young want success overnight and that is rare. Are you committed enough to work for ten years or more to reach the level of finding a thousand fans? Sometimes that means taking a lesser paying job to learn. Or to have the time to code or play gigs on the weekend. Thing about the Internet is you find your true talent level fairly quickly and you might not always like what you learn;<).
Do you want to know Vine's biggest problem? They were owned by Twitter! There is room for only one product to succeed there despite its best efforts to continually sabotage themselves. FYI I do like Twitter.
Depends on how far back you go. In the 1800 / early 1900 if you wanted to hear music you had to see it live. Sheet music was sold for home music enjoyment. It wasn't until 8 track / records / tapes / cds were the physical mediums where that changed.
Interestingly enough, sheet music was actually a big industry in the 19th century. There were superstars, artists getting exploited by publishers, the whole nine yards.
I was flipping through a music history textbook, and the author identified the development of movable type for printing music with the birth of the "music industry."
Beethoven major income is teaching and music score sheet, unlike Hayden in concert. He failed very much in the concert music. Still remember the concert where no 5 the fate symphony was doomed.
His sonata was never played (or may be once) in the first 100 years in public. It was meant to be read and played to the score.
If not mistaken his last act is to rewrite his quartet to 4 hand as this is very popular music at home. There is no mp3 and we do not have 4 person at home unlike Schubert.
But the difference is circulation is still a bit limited. Hence some can still survive. Imagine today if Beethoven is here, he would not be struggle and worry about income in his dying bed. (He would not be starved to death or without a drink. The newly formed London symphony society heard about his worry and sent in money for his tenth and later wine. But even he is on ...)
Beethoven was one of the first pianists to survive without a major aristocratic sponsor, so that was an accomplishment for his day even considering his stature. Not only that he was able to accumulate assets, like shares in a bank, that put him in middle class.
However he did have some unfortunate twists - war caused him to lose a stipend income, promised to him so that he doesn't take up a well paid position for Napoleon's brother. Then of course a period of inactivity due to depression.
For the sonata... are you referring to the Hammerklavier? That was simply a monstrosity of a piece, but it was played in concert only a decade or two later by the virtuoso Liszt.
I agree though, the audience that Beethoven could reach today would well exceed what he could from 1800's Europe, even if most people today prefer pop.
And, at least for EDM, seems to have been replaced by Twitch. I'd never used Twitch for more than a minute before this year. But now I'm on there all day (I'm watching right now in fact) because you can pretty much find a music artist streaming at any time of day, any day of the week.
I'm watching someone from Germany right now. She's a bit unique in that she publishes her real time subscriber number. If you do the math you can see she makes about $25,000/mo just from subs, and that doesn't include bits during hype trains.
Especially for EDM, the songs seem to be premixed. The DJs seem to be standing around, pretending to turn some knobs but the sound doesn't seem to be impacted too much.
I understand artists playing a guitar live on Twitch, but for electronic music?
I’d be surprised if many sets are premixed, but many are preplanned (as in, the DJ knows which songs he/she will play, in what order, and how many bars out/in to start the fade).
Of course, that’s still pretty boring to watch, which is why there’s a lot of fake knob twists and styling going on.
I consume a lot of Youtube DJ sets but it’s all just playing in the background, I never watch the video.
>Ever since Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first published his “Long Tail” theory in 2004, the idea has been endlessly reinforced, contradicted, and debated. He argued that the internet’s removal of physical limitations (local audiences, scarce shelf space) would empower niche products and creators to flourish.
I'm not sure that's what Anderson argued (though I would have to go back and read his original piece). Collectively, the long tail is large even while a power law distribution means that a relatively small amount of content captures an outsized amount of attention. But that doesn't mean individual content creators in the long tail capture much attention (and compensation).
Otherwise, I guess the author is arguing that platforms should adopt strategies to create a gentler power law distribution so that more creators are in the knee of the curve because that would create a healthier environment for more people. I guess I don't really disagree with that although I'll note that most creators will still be in the long tail.
[ADDED: And ultimately it's really the users that determine the distribution even if the platform can influence it.]
I'm not sure if this can ever exist in a world with scarcity.
> a recent study of kids ages eight to 12 found that nearly 30% aspire to become YouTubers
People will always want to go out there, do their own thing, and get paid a middle-class wage for it. The problem is there's a surplus of these people, most actually aren't talented enough to achieve that, and for those who don't have a natural market fit with what they do, they'll have to compromise their vision.
It reminds me of artists getting priced out of a gentrifying urban center. It takes away the character of the neighborhood, but who is to say their art is good, worth fighting for, and that they're more deserving of their apartment than someone with enough money to afford the apartment.
Basically, I don't want to subsidize someone's hobby/lifestyle. I completely support them doing what they want, I just don't want to hear complaints that there's no money in it.
I don't know if this is accurate or romanticized, but my perception is that in the past people who wanted to live as artists were able to do so as long as they were willing to give up some material comfort. For example, maybe they could work a day job (stereotypically waiting tables) and still make enough money for a studio in a bad part of town.
It doesn't seem like that's the case today. Unless you have a profession or work multiple jobs (both of which prohibit having enough time to seriously pursue art) you are completely priced out of America's cosmopolitan cities.
>Unless you have a profession or work multiple jobs (both of which prohibit having enough time to seriously pursue art) you are completely priced out of America's cosmopolitan cities.
The bad parts of cities are still cheap. Within the last ~4yr I did a $1500/mo single bedroom in Boston and a $1300 single bedroom in Waltham (which is a nice but not "surgeons and lawyers buy houses here suburb of Boston). Yes there were mice but I think that is a pretty reasonable trade for the price.
Things start getting stupid expensive when you try to live how you think a white collar professional should live.
$1500 a month for an apartment is a ton. In most places, you’d need to make $60,000 to meet the minimum income requirement. That’s a lot of many for many people.
That's for a single bedroom with parking which are always priced at a premium. You can do better. I just didn't. In the Boston area anyone with a flimsy wisp of a skill (or is able to pass a drug test) is making at least $20/hr and nobody is expecting the poor to be able to follow middle class budgeting rules.
It'd be rough, but you could make $1500 rent work if you make $20 per hour. You might need a larger security deposit because of your income, but landlords might also not check.
> maybe they could work a day job (stereotypically waiting tables) and still make enough money for a studio in a bad part of town.
I respect this; they decided what's important to them, and I think this is a fair situation to be in.
> It doesn't seem like that's the case today
While I agree, at least in the Bay Area, I'm not super sympathetic to this because, and I'm guessing here, I bet a lot of the people who got priced-out or evicted in the last decade+ voted for supervisors in favor preservation and anti-landlord policies. There weren't artists saying "build new luxury condos so I'm not competing with engineers for a run-down studio."
Another aspect is whether these numbers from what kids want at age 10 are worth considering at all. When I was 8-10 I quite seriously wanted to be a soccer player, even though even to a 9-yo me it was starting to become obvious that the ship has sailed, and I wasn't even talented anyway. A classmate (1992-3 in Russia) told me earnestly they wanted to be a contract killer, it was viewed as a glamorous job ;)
I wonder what percentage of kids age 8-12 want to become a professional athlete. I bet it's at least 100-1000x than the amount of job opening at the "can make a full time income" level.
In that case it's mostly the parents that subsidize the lifestyle up until college level.
I have a high school classmate who played pro football for a couple of years. I never got the impression his parents did that much for him to subsidize foodball; it's not like rich parents trying to train their kids to be world-class squash players. It still could have been a $500-$5,000 per year subsidy, though.
Here is a simple math. How many people are needed to feed a single creator into a decent life? I suspect that the answer starts at a 1000 at least. And the creator is not alone. Others will compete for that short amount of time an average person can spare. Also people have other things to do rather than watching youtube/whatever so the chances that the creator finds that 1000 people are getting really thin. I think it is safe to assume the dilution factor is 100 at least. Then add some statistical distribution of market share each creator has, the ability of people to gravitate to already existing communities and suddenly you will discover that the world can not support too many creators at all.
Of course I've pulled the numbers out of my own ... but I think it is reasonable assumption.
I am a writer and commentator (in the Czech Republic). I have about 3500 people on my mailing list and about 10 thousand occasional readers.
I can make reasonable money by selling my books online, having my own e-shop is great, because there is no need to pay various middle men.
2020 was a good year and my total revenue from this business is comparable to what a Google software engineer makes here in Prague. I used to code for living, this is a much less stressful way of life.
But the total amount of supporters necessary exceeds 1000 by a large margin. Even if 1000 people bought two of my books yearly, I would struggle financially.
People support more than one content creator though, if you got the entire media spending of 1000 people you'd do fine. Since your books can't fulfill peoples entire content need though you need more than 1000 people to do that, however 1 full time content creator per 1000 people seems reasonable.
Depends on the type of content they create, how they monetise it, etc.
I know two creators on YouTube of about the same size (about 50K subscribers), and their results have been very different. One of them made enough money to tour the world non stop, and currently lives a digital nomad esque lifestyle, and the other one had to get a job after his channel couldn't support a lifestyle in rural China.
Generally, the more you rely on YouTube for your income, the higher your stats will need to be to live full time off your work. Whereas if you've got money from Patreon, merchandise, etc... then things don't need to be as extreme.
So someone in the former group will likely need about 200K subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views per video on YouTube, whereas one in the latter could get away with a 30-50K channel and far less views per video.
The topic obviously matters too. Gaming content is hell to monetise, whereas financial or business related content seems to have much better ad rates and what not.
If Neil Patel was a gaming blogger, he'd be maybe one tenth as rich.
"How many people are needed to feed a single creator into a decent life?"
I don't think the question makes sence - like what does it actyally mean, obviously we aren't talking about food. Is it perhaps better phares as:
If average amount of money people are willing spend on entertainment, how many creators can a million people support?
But what about people who make repair tutorials, etc, are they included? Is tbe amount of money people spend on entertainment fixed? Are game developers i cluded in this?
>Is tbe amount of money people spend on entertainment fixed?
And time.
For a given person, I think it roughly is. I'm probably going to spend about the same time (and money) watching video somewhat independently of the quality of content available (within reason). Preferences may shift over time--I spend more time reading things online relative to reading books than I did 20 years ago. But broadly, more or better entertainment options won't really shift my total time and money budget.
This is a sort of milquetoast piece: no serious social scientist should be using political hack jargain like "American Dream" and "Middle Class" as if they describe real material phenomena and aren't just memes (in the original scene).
The fact of the matter is that any media platform where the cost of production is minimal is going to have shit power laws.
That said, glad they close out with UBI. If we can't quota the views per video from above, we can at least provide a revenue floor.
We're a non-society with with centralized media: increasingly atomized associated people transfixed by the machine. Only in rebuilding society in meat space forces the sparsely connected graph that coupled with technology allows heterogeneity to really shine.
On second thought, "dissemination" / "distribution" would have been clearer. Don't think it matters so much how much money is blown in the recording studio.
I would say this stems from the the social benefits of consuming content that others consume.
If a large swatch of people with even weakish bonds all watch the same thing, that's a lot of additional value. Smaller groups consuming the same stuff can also work, but you need very strong bonds to commensurate.
The latter stands a chance of producers have a UBI to fall back on. It's kind of like how growing an orchard takes 10 years to turn a profit, but growing a wheat field is instant gratification.
Someone like TikTok, yes, but TikTok is the exception, not the norm. Maybe this works when the content quality difference is limited between top and bottom creators.
Instagram could pull off what TikTok did, but not YouTube.
I think that the end game (we should be working towards) is food forests and robo-factories. Institute UBI. We create a system where our needs are met automatically, by design. Then the economic question fades away.
Part of the problem I have with this sort of thing is that it seldom addresses the "other half" of personal finance: how you spend your money.
Robots are more efficient at work, they are easy to specialize (they do not need studies, just a program and its parts are made to measure for the job) and they consume less energy than human beings, so that should really be our future, intellectual humans and worker robots.
Food forests would be a quick early solution, the long-term solution would be the creation of vitamin supplements that contain all the necessary nutrients at a low cost and faster compared to what it takes to grow plants.
> "and let others determine if it is working or playing" (quote in your web page)
I do not distinguish between play and work when I do research in mathematics, but I have to work as a programmer because mathematicians are starving in Latin America (It is a phrase to say that they do not earn much, for those dumbasses who do not understand the joke and downvote me) and worse someone like me, 19 years old, without work experience nor university degree.
I might add a #11 on to this: ensure that the financial incentives of your platform align with those of your creators.
I think that a lot of problems arise for creators when these are not aligned, for instance, in many advertising-driven models. YouTube, which has received a lot of creator backlash, will always be pressured financially to serve the needs of advertisers first, since they are the ones putting money into the system. YouTube doesn't want to do things that are bad for creators, but creators are not their primary customers.
Another example of misalignment is the case of Spotify, who sold significant stakes to the major record labels to bring them on board. CEO Daniel Ek says (probably sincerely) that they want to help one million artists live off of their art. Spotify renewed its deal with Universal Music Group in July, and Ek, in a podcast [1] last year, in spite of repeating the one million artists goal, went on to discuss their desire to provide additional services to the labels, which would seemingly run counter to this in favor of preserving existing power structures.
Some of this must also be a scale problem: once you reach a certain size and have made deals with big existing players to get there, you need to serve their interests because the risk of losing them is too great.
11. Creators could move to countries with very cheap cost of living (outsource themselves).
12. Creators could invest in machine learning to lower the marginal cost of generating content. GPT-# will probably work well on music and video. It's mostly a matter of model size and training set size.
13. The U.S. could greatly increase funding for the national endowment for the arts.
The fundamental problem with entertainment as a career is that it's a zero-sum game. People have finite time, can rarely consume more than one piece of entertainment at a time, and most have a fixed budget for entertainment per month.
About the only thing that's been unexplored on a large scale is participatory entertainment which is the only growth space left and is slightly positive-sum; if the entertainment coexists with economy then it can grow a bit bigger. The best example I can think of is dance/music festivals (Dickens Fair as an example in the bay area) where entertainers are paid directly by ticket proceeds and a temporary market exists creating additional value for anyone willing to participate: In theory it's open to a large number of participant-vendors who can sell their own goods and service and be entertained. Any sort of community entertainment economy can benefit like this by creating value in both directions between entertainers and the entertained.
What would that look like on a large scale? I have no idea. But all the giant Internet media markets are very unidirectional. Cash flows to the market via advertisers (also zero-sum without external growth in the economy) and purchases/subscriptions and some passes on to the entertainers. Any value creation in the other direction has to be made in separate markets.
I think what the article doesn't address is that for the middle class to exist it has to create a significant amount of value; at least as much as it consumes. If it can't, then it requires UBI to continue to exist (which is suggested as option 9 in the article). But most of what the middle class consumes isn't produced by the rest of the middle class, unbalancing the economics.
Techno-club.net was built for this purpose. It's artists who normally residence in clubs and instead play their sets live on the site on the weekends. It's growing rapidly. Check them out if you are a techno fan. Edit: this was meant as a reply to a comment below. Apologies.
I do not think he will survive in the older days. Bit in the new economy and have a few hundreds Patreon he got enough to live by in USA. Not much just write an article a day or two and filter and react to fan comment.
Not sure he saved enough as USA has no health and he lived alone. When he stopped writing for 2 days without saying it, I really started to worry. ... USA is so harsh in this aspects. But guess that is a reality. Still read him everyday.
The middle mentioned about great deal etc. whilst important I cannot help to notice if we cannot allow minor to work, the immediate example of 14 something to become a big star would not happen. Of course she might be forced to do child Labour for tiktok or YouTube. But that kind of mismatch of underlying superstar economics vs we need a salary for all is a problem cannot be solved by the new platform.
The winner take it all is an issue. This is totally different from the issue of top 1% controlling the politics and finances in the old (finance based) economy.
The creator economy is just an outgrowth of celebrity culture. I think in that regard it’s pretty interesting in that it does have something of a middle class. Or at least micro celebrities making a middle class living in their niche. But it all follows a power law distribution and there isn’t much I can see that will improve that. It’s always going to be the preserve of the few.
The real middle class in the creator economy is with all the people supplying these celebrities. Working on building tools, platforms, content like games and providing services and so on.
The technology of recording itself is a lot to blame for the near total loss of the creator economy. For example when you make music you are competing with every song ever recorded in the 20th century. Creators are being destroyed by the wealth of available content. Why should someone listen to my music even if its extremely creative when they have the entire cannon of Duke Ellington available for free from their $9.95 per month?
I had a fit once and put on some Glen Miller. I won't say it wasn't very good, but it wasn't something I am interested in at the time.
If anything, modern music is more spread out than ever allowing more subcultures to have their favorite music niche, something that wasn't possible in the sixties.
"For example when you make music you are competing with every song ever recorded in the 20th century"
Technically true, but changing moods and fashion mean that relatively few contemporary people will spend their life listening to Fats Domino. Only the very best of the past has even chance to be heard.
I think it’s definitely true that there's some undiscovered talent out there. But I think this article goes a bit too far in assuming that a significant number creators deserve an audience and an income that aren't getting it now, enough to create a creator middle class. I wish that was the case, but in the time I spent working in arts and entertainment I can’t support that view of the world.
Many people create art for the wrong reasons. Their goal is to be the center of attention, but they don’t have anything interesting to say, haven’t put in very much work, haven’t really considered why what they created is in the best interest of the audience, not just in the best interest of the artist.
If a platform goes too far in recommending content that isn’t very good, and taking resources away from its successful creators and redistributing them to its less successful, their viewers and talent will leave for another platform. For most of the long-tail creators, their best chance at a middle class income will be a day job off the platform, or in a job as support system for a successful creator that hires staff (crew, marketing, props, editing).
> But I think this article goes a bit too far in assuming that a significant number creators deserve an audience and an income that aren't getting it now, enough to create a creator middle class. I wish that was the case, but in the time I spent working in arts and entertainment I can’t support that view of the world.
Hmm, as someone working in the media in some fashion, I'd say there's a huge number of creators that deserve an audience and income who aren't getting it now. Those 6 or so lists of underrated gaming YouTubers I posted in the last few years should be evidence of that to some degree (though many of the people included did take off afterwards).
Every week or so I come across at least one creator who I believe should be much more successful than they currently are.
picarto.tv is an art streaming site. If you looked at the top hundred streams there the artists are all probably studio grade, but maybe a tenth of them actually make a living off their art.
A lot of people are making a lot of good stuff for free online and making pennies on it because in practice its not talent that is scarce, its eyeball access and virality. Your average webcomic artist today does not have the resources to exploit the psychology of target demographics the way Disney will for their next streaming show or the war chest to shove ads for it down throats until it reaches a critical self perpetuating mass of popularity.
That doesn't make the stuff they make less worthy of being enjoyed, though. They just can't spread the message by themselves.
I have had my perspective challenged a great deal, not by this article, but instead by checking my assumptions against the numbers using the Graphtreon[0] site linked in a sub-article[1] to the parent article.
I'd assumed that there was a solid, or at least "quiet but present", middle class of content creators. I believed this because I felt like I follow a set of content creators which where pretty far outside the "mainstream", since I didn't observe them having "superstar" numbers, nor did I ever see them casually mentioned outside of their own content.
Looking at the data, all of them are in the top 2,000 Patreon users and most of them are in the top 1,000. Here's a compacted list:
| Creator Name | Patreon Rank | Estimated Monthly |
| | | Income (Patreon) |
|---------------------------|--------------|-------------------|
| Well There’s Your Problem | 108 | $11,196.00 |
| LoadingReadyRun | 411 | $14,772.00 |
| Jay Foreman | 995 | $2,620.00 |
| Summoning Salt | 1478 | $2,026.00 |
| Wendover Productions | 1684 | $2,220.00 |
| Practical Engineering | 1872 | $1,600.00 |
The creator that stands out most is the #1 spot holder, the "Well There's Your Problem" podcast. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, each recounted in a very irreverent and roundabout style. I primarily watch this podcast through YouTube, and their YouTube content gets what I'd consider very "acceptable" view rates, on the order of 50k - 90k total views. From that, I would have expected them to fall more in the ~$1,000 tier of monthly Patreon income, but instead they're enjoying wild success.
I have to assume their success comes from them doing well on platforms outside of YouTube, and their consistent marketing of Patreon rewards (additional content for Patreon subscribers).
Goes to show that there's more than one way to find success, though the number of paths still seems pretty constrained.
I think the public is assailed by so much content that it unconsciously protects itself against it. One way is the star system, which is what we are seeing here.
For YouTube and TikTok at least, a "creator middle class" isn't possible. People become popular on these platforms not so much for what they do but how they look.
Pokimane, for instance, doesn't have 6 million subscribers because she plays video games. She has 6 million subscribers because people find her attractive. The content she produces is incidental.
As long as the content produced involves the creators themselves, the most attractive people are going to bubble towards the top and take the largest slices of the creator pie, and that can't be changed.
I think there are different niches, pokimane belongs to the niche of teen simps (to which most of the internet consumers belong). But there are also other niches: comedy, travel, music, gameplays, competitive gameplays, funny gameplays, politics, science, etc. Where looks aren't everything... In other niches, you can grab the public's attention with attractive thumbnails.
While this may be partly true, there are several 'talking hands' creators that do very well, at least in more 'informative' content(AvE, This Old Tony, etc)
That means putting them in the middle class. Middle class means you have income from both labor and capital, it includes plumbers with healthy retirement savings. The only way to be lower class is to have severely insufficient savings.
How do you become a successful creator if the search algorithm has changed into a social engineering / propaganda / corporate shill experiment?
See this new video today by an independent creator. He may be a satanist but I believe satanists deserve to have their voices heard also.
"Youtube Has Basically Shadowbanned All Independent Political/News Commentary"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuq9-pGdWo&t=710s
Some recent exceptions that make me feel hope for the middle class of the arts: Etsy, Netflix & Hulu, the world of podcasting. In all three of these places you can see people trying out ideas and making a living. It’s true that the businesses themselves – Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Amazon, etc. – are decidedly not middle class, the content creators on their platforms seem to be. (I can’t think of equivalents in books or music... SoundCloud? I got nothing for books.)