And yet it is. And if it weren’t some other rents seeking platform Would take its place.
What the author is ultimately complaining about is something they touched upon, which is that the creative market is saturated and in order to survive you need to have another job.
You can call it “diversification of revenue sources,” but what it actually is is getting a job as a waiter or a waitress while you audition for your Hollywood dreams.
And it happens when there are too many people wanting to sing and dance and be in movies and not enough people ready to pay them to do that.
So there’s an oversupply of creative talent, which is about to get even more squeezed as artificial intelligence pushes in on human capital.
There are, at the end of the day, only so many eyeballs, and not everyone can be the radio star.
Whenever there is a financialization of creative markets, there are artists screaming about the legitimacy of the art, and the connection with the receiver of that art, is being tainted by the commercialization.
But it doesn’t matter. The commercialization is inevitable because artist need to eat, and unless they have patrons, they have customers, and that’s just how the thing has worked throughout history.
Really at core it’s just another industry being eaten by software.
This is a trend that has been going on for a very long time, as tokenization and monetization and incremental digital transformation comes in and gradually disassembles ways of human existence into component parts and creates a business model around them. Let’s remember that painters screamed about photography being sacrilege and not even qualifying as an art form as the process involved no expression but mere capture. I met a few in my younger years who regaled me with my camera about the wrong I was committing.
It’s been the thing that’s been going on here for 30 years (and I’ve been lucky to watch the juice being squeezed). But from a digital perspective this is the way that it works in the modern economy. There’s a gold rush, then a reckoning, and from ashes emerge winners and losers, eventually leading to another stabilized period. That stability then transforms by new technology (the next breakthrough) and another rapid change of social behavior and income opportunity happens. It just goes on and on as digital technology progresses.
> The content should be meaningful, insightful, written, recorded or filmed for your audience. The people who give a shit. The people who care.
That’s the price of digital. It exacts emotional taxes to make change and people find it difficult and objectionable to watch their values erode as it gets eaten by disruption. But can anyone really get off the bus? Maybe if there’s a large scale EMP attack, the internet is shut down from a massive cybersecurity event, or solar flare, but I see almost no other way to stop the disruption otherwise as the snake that eats it tail pays the bills.