Since the birth of the "creator economy" there has been increasing attention on what appears to be a simple problem: how to pay artists. Or, to look at the problem upside-down: how to get people to pay for art. It feels like an easy problem because (almost) everyone agrees that art is important. Everyone consumes art, all the time, and most people rate the activity as highly enjoyable (to both produce and consume). Yet, the problem has remained a thorny, persistent one. Most artists make almost nothing from their work. The starving artist is a cliché. A cliché doesn't become a cliché without some truth to it.
Recently, tech platforms have seized on the problem, deciding, once and for all, that they intend to solve it. Substack calls itself "a new economic engine for culture," with the engine being paid subscriptions, which they state a few hundred of which "can support a livelihood." Patreon's homepage makes the bold claim that "creator is now a career" and that you can "make it making art." The Base app touts the tagline, "it pays to be here," stating their platform as "an app where creativity is rewarded"—ostensibly with money.
Technology platforms give creators unprecedented reach and exposure, but at a cost. The vast scale and sophistication of these platforms also makes them fragile. As Nassim Nichols Taleb writes in Antifragile, complex systems have a tendency to make their domains more fragile by introducing single points of failure. A TikTok star can reach millions of people at once, but if they are banned from their platform (or the platform is legislated out of existence), that reach evaporates.
Over the last few years, I've been thinking about this problem. Mostly from a personal, selfish angle: how can I make money as a writer. Not a little windfall here or there, but a stable middle-class income. I thought that I could be different. Other artists were "starving" because they didn't know what I knew, didn't have the drive, the talent. But the money never came. After years of failure to earn much of anything—let alone anything consistent—I stopped beating myself up and started wondering if there were bigger problems. Rot in the deep in the foundation of the creator economy.
I started writing this article six months ago, but I stopped after four-thousand rambling words, realizing the problem was big, much bigger than I expected, and getting worse, not better. This sent me into a depressive spiral. It seemed impossible to solve this problem, either for myself now in my life, or for other artists. The structural failures were too huge and too numerous. I put off this article because writing it was too hard. I didn't want to face what it was telling me.
In order to get this down, I'm going to keep things simple. Rather than make any kind of argument (let alone propose much in the way of solutions), I'm going to simply jot down my thoughts in an ordered list. It may form a kind of map, if you will, of the many pitfalls that swallow artists on the path to making money.
Throughout this list, I'll be referring to "artist" in the broad sense as anyone who works in a creative medium. Painters, sculptors, writers, poets, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, etc. etc.
Creative work is subject to a winner-take-all power distribution. A small handful of top talents take the vast majority of attention. When it comes to Elizabethan literature, all attention goes to William Shakespeare. When you think of impressionism, you think of Monet. Small groups (or even single artists) dominate our imaginations and are read, collected, seen, discussed, and referenced again and again.
Consumption of creative work has a social element. Everyone wants to be consuming the same thing. It's more fun that way, less lonely. If everyone is reading the same book, that book's sales shoot into the stratosphere. The rest are left with crumbs.
Creative economies function as superstar markets. A tiny fraction capture almost all the attention and almost all of the revenue. It's more efficient this way, and technology makes these markets even more efficient over time via better distribution engines. The overall reach increases, but the share of reach diminishes.
Technology has created a historical pattern, where art moves from local to national to global. Before recorded music, you could only listen to music live. This meant that local musicians could serve local markets. The introduction of recording music technology, however, allowed a few elite performers (like Enrico Caruso) to reach unprecedented audience sizes.
Local artists don't disappear overnight in the face of new technology. But they are forced into new roles. They become teachers and highly-specialized performers. It is no longer enough just to create art. Artistic skills become a service that can be sold, not something that produces a product with value of its own. Art (for art's sake) belongs to the technology-enabled superstars.
You can see this dynamic playing out with AI today. Corporate copywriters and content marketers are already being forced to adapt. They must use the tools that are threatening to replace them. Soon, they will do little writing, but instead, they will be pressed into the service of training the rest of the organization on how to use AI effectively.
Digital platforms have not reversed the superstar trend (regardless of the slogans they place on their websites) but have exacerbated it. Recommendation algorithms create positive feedback loops. Popular content gets recommended more, becoming even more popular, leading to viral breakouts. Digital platforms have near-zero marginal costs of distribution, meaning there's no natural ceiling on how much market share a single creator can capture. A TikTok star can serve millions of views with no additional effort on their part.
Recently, Paragraph (the platform which I use to power this publication) rolled out a new featured called creator coins. It is their latest attempt to solve some of the problems I wrote about in this essay. Whether these coins help this writing find its audience (or make me any money), I genuinely don't know. It isn't lost on me that I'm critiquing the creator economy using the creator economy's latest tools. If you enjoyed this piece, you can support it. I'll get a small monetary reward and you get a stake in the essay's success (which may or may not be worth anything—I would assume it would not). The irony writes itself: the better I argue that artists can't get paid, the more you might be inclined to pay me for making that argument. We are all, in a sense, complicit.
The featured image for this piece is The Gothic Arch by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (published 1750/1758), courtesy of the National Gallery of Art. It is part of a larger series of fantasy prison etchings. I chose it because the tiny figures navigating an elaborate maze is like what artists feel trying to navigate large systems that are not set up for them to succeed.
But there's another layer to this choice. According to Wikipedia, Piranesi's prison etchings have inspired other creative work over the centuries, including M.C. Escher's famous lithograph "Ascending and Descending," Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Pit and the Pendulum," Brian Ferneyhough's chamber works Carceri d'invenzione, the 1998 film The Sound of Carceri (which features Yo-Yo Ma performing works by Johann Sebastian Bach in a computer generated simulation of Carceri), and Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi. Piranesi's work continues to inspire other artists (and generate more art), but none of that value can ever flow back to him (mostly because he's been dead since 1778). How could you possibly predict, and capture, that value? The final irony: I'm using this image because it's in the public domain (because that artist has been dead for centuries) to make a point about how artists can't capture the value they create.
Subscribe to The Driftless
Essays from an untouched corner of the internet.
Tom Beck
The creator economy is effectively an attention economy. There are only so many people and so many hours in the day for them to consume content, turning entertainment into an aggressive zero-sum race. Platforms have gotten good at directing that attention to a small number of creators because that keeps users on the platform (and keeps them coming back).
The central paradox at the heart of the creator economy is that it is easier than ever to create and distribute content, but harder than ever to build a sustainable creative career. Trying to solve the problem with digital platforms is like trying to put out a fire with a flamethrower.
Creativity is simple and natural. Humans are creative animals. Spend time with young children and you will see first-hand how deeply embedded creativity is in all of us. Because it is so natural, we do it, and we do it all the time. But this poses an economic problem: there is way too much creative supply.
Every culture in every time period created art. We have always done so, for the entirety of our history. When we have a second to breathe, when our bellies are filled and shelter is found; when we feel safe, the next thing we do is create art.
The barriers of entry for creative work are low and disappearing by the minute. You can learn any creative craft with a few hours and an internet connection. YouTube will teach you more than most pre-moderns had access to in a lifetime. AI will walk you through any creative block. There is so much good art that already exists, and so much more of it is being created at every second.
Artists who want to make money must pay the passion premium. Like teachers, counselors, and those in mission-driven work, salaries are notoriously low. These roles are underpaid because the "passion" for the work is expected to make up the difference. Intermediaries can underpay (and rip off) artists because the passion is supposed to be the point (and because there's a steady stream of hopefuls all vying for their big break).
Livable wages must be, by definition, consistent. You must always have your shelter in place. You always need to eat. But creative success is never consistent. What piece of art resonates with an audience, when and why, is so hard to predict. Creative output is driven by feast and famine, but the famine is so much more likely that even a few feasts are insufficient to cover the gaps.
Subscriptions try and solve the consistency problem by flattening the unpredictability of artistic output. It is an attempt to capture brief, viral attention surges and convert them into repeatable, consistent revenue.
There's little incentive to promote undiscovered artists, no matter how talented they may be. Intermediaries (like digital platforms) are only interested in growing the total pie (not in how it is allocated), and that's easier to do with established voices. And if you're one of those established voices, you can corner the market. There's no benefit to helping a rising talent, only the risk that they may get good enough to steal your market.
The individual creator must negotiate with these intermediaries, which are much larger (and better organized) than them. These institutions have more market power and better information, which they can use as leverage against individual artists. They can spread the risk of creative work across many projects while individual creators cannot.
Much of the value created by art is positive externalities (cultural enrichment, inspiration, etc.) that artists can't monetize. Art is important, but it is not valuable. Platforms are much better at capturing the value of the network than any individual nodes on that network (the artists).
Creative value accrues on a timescale that is longer than a human lifespan. It can take decades, sometimes centuries, for a work to "find its audience." But artists need immediate income and many simply cannot wait long enough for the value of their work to accrue. Just ask Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Vincent van Gogh, and H.P. Lovecraft, what their cultural cachet bought them.
The fundamental problem is that art creates value in ways that can't be captured by the artist. Musicians writes songs inspired by other songs. Founders create companies based on worldviews informed by novels. Paintings spark conversations that create political movements. Economic and social value is created, but it flows everywhere except back to the original artist.
The starving artist is a romantic ideal, and one that turns cruel when it produces the complementary idea that suffering produces better art. This creates a cycle where precarity is romanticized, even desired. Even artists who could make money don't for fear of "selling out" or otherwise ruining their muse.
What goes into creating art is often invisible, and the monetary side even more so. Most successful artists had some kind of financial support, either through independent wealth, working spouses, or day jobs, but these factors are often ignored in the success mythologizing that happens posthumously.
All this siphons into a self-reinforcing system. Financial instability makes artists risk-averse, limiting their innovation. Lack of security pushes artists to produce what's commercially safe rather than artistically ambitious. Economic pressures force talented people out of creative fields. Those who succeed despite these pressures are often those with external financial support. The struggling artist narrative becomes self-fulfilling as systems develop around the assumption of artistic poverty.
And yet, and yet—the urge to create remains. Maybe it doesn't matter if you are paid, if you can "make a living" doing it. Because creativity is a living all its own. People will continue to make art even when it isn't economically viable. Even if there are zero incentives to do so. Even under the threat of torture or murder. We can't help ourselves. Creativity is the song that sounds in our bones. We are drawn to it as easily as a bird sings, as a dolphin swims, as a spider spins its web.
Support dialog
Over 500 subscribers
