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Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

pluralistic.net

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Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#101

Post by CPLX »

largelady97 wrote: post #96
CPLX wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this. Take away all the musicians and their music and see what Spotify and all its software developers are worth by themselves. Now do the opposite. Figured it out yet? Music is one of the most universal and important things in our culture. People define themselves and their identity with it, and most certainly value it and will pay for it. How we structure our economic systems determines if it’s “cheap” or…

Society is growing out of all that egotistic nonsense. We have built a large corpus of music. We don't need no more music. That problem has been solved. That area has been explored. All the good chord progressions, songs, sounds have been found and are in the corpus. It is quite clear musicians are no longer needed or wanted.

Perhaps there’s some sort of emerging trend in the usual community of rapacious sociopathic nerds out in San Mateo County that will soon take over the world but last I checked new music still fills stadiums.

Not to mention that the most successful and fastest growing digital network of the current generation was built on the back of people dancing to recorded music, almost exclusively newly created music.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#102

Post by ip26 »

pdonis wrote: post #84
ip26 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a thought experiment. What are the reasons you aren’t paid for the value you create? Can you fix some of them? In this case, it’s postulated the biggest single factor is a monopsony.

Yes, and the only way to fix the monopsony is for creators to own their own distribution channels so they can sell directly to their customers instead of selling to middlemen who take the vast majority of the profits and pay them peanuts.

Or collective bargaining.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#103

Post by mdorazio »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #85
pfdietz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markets are how economic value gets defined. Trying to define it otherwise is fraught with often disastrous difficulty. This is one of the reasons central planning fails. I think one of the reasons so many creatives feel cheated is there's far too much creativity, so the marginal value of more is low. In that situation of overabundance, some other step in the value chain will deliver most of the value, and reap the r…

If economic value is defined through markets, how then does one argue against markets' ability to assign value? What words should be used other than value?

Typical words for this include “monopoly/monopsony”, “regulatory capture”, and “necessity goods”. There are others, too, but they generally don’t apply to creative outputs.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#104

Post by [deleted] »

roughly wrote: post #68
pfdietz wrote: post #4

What this is saying is that creativity is privileged and (unlike other forms of labor) should be given more than the market says it's worth. Why should non-creatives go along with this?

> more than the market says it's worth. The market’s got nothing to do with it. The music industry is a cartel. Look at the profit margins of the big 3 music companies: that’s a lowball on what the market says the art is worth, but it’s not making it back to the artists.

[deleted]

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#105

Post by pfdietz »

pdonis wrote: post #79
pfdietz wrote: post #4

What this is saying is that creativity is privileged and (unlike other forms of labor) should be given more than the market says it's worth. Why should non-creatives go along with this?

> more than the market says it's worth It isn't. The market says it's worth a lot. But the vast majority of that "a lot" doesn't go to the actual creators. It goes to middlemen. Unfortunately, the only fix for that, from the creators' point of view, is for them to own the middlemen themselves. But creators generally have neither the time nor the desire to do that, and doing it detracts from their ability to create.

We're talking about two different things. One is the creative product of the artists themselves, the other is the packaged, delivered product purchased by consumers. The latter includes elements not in the former. The market is saying those elements can be worth more than the creative's output.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#106

Post by Dalewyn »

nope1000 wrote: post #40
Dalewyn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why should non-creatives go along with this? We shouldn't. Art has historically been vastly overvalued and I like that its perceived/demanded value has been sharply declining over the past several decades and especially now with the advent of "AI". I'm sorry if anyone reading this is an artist and I just twisted your pantaloons, but artists don't serve any valuable role in society. Artists exist strictly because soc…

There is no value in music, books, movies, video games? Or did you just think about paintings?

>There is no value in music, books, movies, video games?

No.

When push comes to shove and society can't afford luxuries for one reason or another, they are among the first things thrown out for a greater (valuable) cause with no tangible losses sustained.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#107

Post by Dalewyn »

pdonis wrote: post #86
Dalewyn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why should non-creatives go along with this? We shouldn't. Art has historically been vastly overvalued and I like that its perceived/demanded value has been sharply declining over the past several decades and especially now with the advent of "AI". I'm sorry if anyone reading this is an artist and I just twisted your pantaloons, but artists don't serve any valuable role in society. Artists exist strictly because soc…

> artists don't serve any valuable role in society I assume then that you don't listen to any music, don't watch TV or movies, don't read any books, don't have any pictures on your walls, live in a concrete box with no artistic design applied, and so on? In other words, that you get no value from art in any form?

>In other words, that you get no value from art in any form?

No value I could not do without, no.

Art is a luxury, it's not strictly necessary for living. As such, the real inherent value of art will always be extremely low.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#108

Post by pdonis »

Dalewyn wrote: post #107
pdonis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> artists don't serve any valuable role in society I assume then that you don't listen to any music, don't watch TV or movies, don't read any books, don't have any pictures on your walls, live in a concrete box with no artistic design applied, and so on? In other words, that you get no value from art in any form?

>In other words, that you get no value from art in any form? No value I could not do without, no. Art is a luxury, it's not strictly necessary for living. As such, the real inherent value of art will always be extremely low.

> No value I could not do without

You're quibbling. If you aren't doing without it, then it has value.

> Art is a luxury, it's not strictly necessary for living.

Neither is the conversation we're having now, nor the medium in which we are having it. Yet I don't think anyone would say the Internet, or even this website, has no value.

The vast majority of the wealth currently on this planet is "not strictly necessary for living". But "living" is more than just bare subsistence. People value quality of life, and art is a major contribution to many people's quality of life. That's why people are willing to pay significant amounts of money for it.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#109

Post by pdonis »

ip26 wrote: post #102
pdonis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the only way to fix the monopsony is for creators to own their own distribution channels so they can sell directly to their customers instead of selling to middlemen who take the vast majority of the profits and pay them peanuts.

Or collective bargaining.

> Or collective bargaining.

The problem with collective bargaining is that it either involves unmanageable transaction costs, or an unmanageable principal-agent problem. Either every single creator has to be directly involved in the bargaining, which can't realistically be done, or the creators have to empower some small subset of them as bargaining agents, which means the rest of the creators get screwed by those agents.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#110

Post by pdonis »

pfdietz wrote: post #105
pdonis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more than the market says it's worth It isn't. The market says it's worth a lot. But the vast majority of that "a lot" doesn't go to the actual creators. It goes to middlemen. Unfortunately, the only fix for that, from the creators' point of view, is for them to own the middlemen themselves. But creators generally have neither the time nor the desire to do that, and doing it detracts from their ability to create.

We're talking about two different things. One is the creative product of the artists themselves, the other is the packaged, delivered product purchased by consumers. The latter includes elements not in the former. The market is saying those elements can be worth more than the creative's output.

> The market is saying those elements can be worth more than the creative's output.

No, customers aren't saying that. Customers are just saying that the final packaged, delivered product they receive (today a better description would be the overall service channel through which they receive the products) is worth what they pay for it. They aren't paying the various contributors separately so their payments say nothing about how much they think those individual contributions are worth.

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