131–140 of 273 posts
I don't understand why somehow lots of people are discovering the economics of art as if it's some new situation, when the notion of the "starving artist" has been around for ages. Rewards in creative fields have always been distributed on a very steep pareto curve, and the expected financial ROI across all aspirants is non-positive. This situation isn't some new development of the internet age.
source: artist
Online artists, particularly those gunning for a big twitter following, have to hit it with a specific niche to make it big. I've seen people blow up for drawing really great knights, or sexy sea monsters, or for making really cool space ships. The big artists typically have an area of focus that goes viral. Or they are the highest professionals who work on Disney, Pixar, Video games etc. I have a story of watching s…
Outside of my regular job, I am an indie folk music artist, trying to rise in the local music scene here in Dnipro, Ukraine. Even though learning to be a musician from scratch in my 20s was a hard process that took years and years, by far the hardest part of it was trying to establish a passive income, so I could have enough free time for practicing, performing and writing music. A lot of my talented peers are so muc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patronage. Honestly music was profitable for a very brief period of time between around 1940s-1990's. Every other time in history it's required someone rich to like you enough to pay you to do it, or be a traveling minstrel who lived on the edge of society. Like even Wagner who is arguably one of the most influential and popular composers of all time spent most of his life destitute and only was stable when the Kaise…
> Honestly music was profitable for a very brief period of time between around 1940s-1990's. And having a market like this for a while bought us an incredible bounty of all kinds of music, some incredibly sophisticated, some with subtle & important things to say, some with all the art of a schoolyard taunt, some finding both wide and deep appeal. If the conditions were unusual, so was the harvest -- bountiful enough…
I appreciate you pointing this out the full quote I am referring is "You can by anything in this world for money, so if something can't be bought for money it is not of this world."
I feel like music tries to give us something that is not of this world, which is why we have so many problems when trying to figure out how to price music.
There's a lot of entitlement from "artists" who sit on a moral high horse and expect special treatment because they're "expressing a higher truth" while the rest of us normies toil in obscurity and sell our souls to corporate overlords to pay the bills. Not all artists are like that, and IME the more successful and experienced ones are the least likely to think that way, but the attitude is quite common with beginner…
With the development of AI, it's been quite an experience to see artists grasping the fact that their craft is not the magical thing they think it is.
There's a lot of entitlement from "artists" who sit on a moral high horse and expect special treatment because they're "expressing a higher truth" while the rest of us normies toil in obscurity and sell our souls to corporate overlords to pay the bills. Not all artists are like that, and IME the more successful and experienced ones are the least likely to think that way, but the attitude is quite common with beginner…
A lot of people would say the same about programmers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patreon isn't an easy ticket, but it does seem like it's opened up some interesting opportunities. I listen to a few podcasts where the hosts have been able to quit their full time jobs and live on Patreon income. Being funded by Patreon as opposed to ads means you don't necessarily need to maintain a huge audience to live, just a dedicated one. So you're more free to explore less popular topics that you know the aud…
> Most podcasts being created now will probably still fail there's somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000,000 serialized podcasts. "Most ... fail" is barely descriptive!
Outside of my regular job, I am an indie folk music artist, trying to rise in the local music scene here in Dnipro, Ukraine. Even though learning to be a musician from scratch in my 20s was a hard process that took years and years, by far the hardest part of it was trying to establish a passive income, so I could have enough free time for practicing, performing and writing music. A lot of my talented peers are so muc…
Is the local music scene up and running? Aren't you like 100 miles from the front?
It's not really a new situation for us. This war continues for 8 years, and all this time the front was about 200 miles from us. During this new phase of the invasion the frontline got a little closer to Dnipro, but not that much.
Regular life here stopped in winter-spring, when we didn't know which cities will withstand this phase of the invasion. Tragically Kherson, Mariupol and many others are lost as of now. But we in Dnipro were lucky enough and life kind of continues here.
There are changes of course. Practically no artist in Ukraine gets paid now at any level. Every single concert is for charity, gathering funds for arms or refugees. And, as with all other life, there are constant interruptions of air raid sirens.
Other than that, music scene lives as usual. People still go to concerts and artists still perform. Predictably a lot of sad sad songs gets written now, but honestly no one really wants to hear them - everyone here gets enough negativity from everywhere else. The best bet is to stick to the happy and hopeful stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patronage. Honestly music was profitable for a very brief period of time between around 1940s-1990's. Every other time in history it's required someone rich to like you enough to pay you to do it, or be a traveling minstrel who lived on the edge of society. Like even Wagner who is arguably one of the most influential and popular composers of all time spent most of his life destitute and only was stable when the Kaise…
Hypothetically music should be priced like medicine or drugs. What you "get" out of it is a mood, like a stimulant or depressant (but with more complexity and side effects). "For $20, I can sell you this audio file that makes you yearn for the deep friendships you created that summer a few years ago. Side effects may include vivid visual memories and internal hallucinations of what could have been, sudden mood swings…