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The landscape is shifting yes, and it's harder to make money. But consider that the last 150 years of mass literacy and spare time to consume vast quantities of media is already a historical anomaly. If you look at the sheer quantity of culture produced and consumed, it's hard to see it as anything but a golden age. The fact that it's harder to make money in these conditions makes perfect economic sense.

But on the positive side, I think this gives us a helpful sign post on the way to UBI/post-scarcity society. Consider that one of the biggest political impediments to UBI is not just the puritan work ethic as applied to others, but perhaps even more fundamental is the individual's own need to feel useful. De-coupling creative output from ones livelihood does not necessarily have to be a terrible thing.

Whether or not you think that 'the last 150 years [...] is a historical anomaly' is irrelevant. The fact is that it was better, and there's no legitimate reason that it should now be worse except for the anticompetitive actions of a few big corporations that loss lead by providing expensive-to-produce services for free to eliminate competition.

People can care for their own needs, or team up to care for the needs of their community. There is still work to do. Some communities could become self reliant, also making use of technologies such as 3d-printing, automation and solar panels. It would make people the creators of their own future, instead of passive recipients.

I feel like the economy as a whole has been hit by this pattern. Call it "disruption","creative destruction", or whatever, but the general pattern has been that supply has gone up (it's never been easier to create content) while demand has remained constant (only so many eyeballs and so much time). Back then you could grow smoothly since there were always new people to reach, and only so much content for them to read.

With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something.

This is the whole point of the article - while artists likely had it better in the old situation, from an outside perspective, increased supply == more creation == cultural boom in quantity; ever-increasing standards + larger pool of candidates competing for attention == cultural boom in quality.

Saying that this is killing culture is like saying "nobody ever goes there, it's too crowded". Yes, the growth in supply is killing art as a job, but that's more a sign of a general transformation of all non-horrible jobs towards something that's not paid; as long as the planet has more than enough people who are willing and able to do that thing for free, it won't be a valid source of income except for rare exceptions.

This what I find frightening about the landscape we're moving into. When the emphasis becomes on the volume of your content and how fast it can be produced, the overall artistic output of a culture suffers because there's no system to support artists doing 'deep work'.

So it's difficult to agree with your point that increasing standards and a larger pool of candidates create more quality. In my experience, quality artistic output is a time sink that arises from repeatedly generating and refining concepts and the media itself.

Volume of your content is an emphasis only while the revenue is low but still reasonable to work for, which is at best a phase of transition. As the revenue goes to zero and becomes insignificant (which is already the case for many art forms), or even becomes negative (i.e. authors paying in effort or money to attract attention to a free product), there is no emphasis on the volume of your content - the emphasis is on building something that's good enough to get attention despite an overwhelming supply of free alternatives, and that barrier is getting higher and higher. The people that break above that standard do invest quality deep work and a time sink, even despite a lack of system to fund most of them. Yes, funding them would likely help - but as current reality shows, it's not strictly necessary, the supply of good art anyway outstrips the availability of attention.

With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something.

Is this any different, or even less desirable, than the patronage style of old, where only a relative few obtained artist-in-residence-style support from from the limited market of nobles and moneyed interests (who may have been maintaining stables of artisans as a conspicuous display of wealth rather than a specific interest in the artist or their works)? Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history?

> Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history?

It was probably true for top fine artists, but at a price of working on commission (i.e. clients dictating the content). For writers, philosophers and composers, I think it was much tougher. For example Chopin, even when he was a celebrity, was living largely off piano lessons. Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.

> Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.

As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.

It was the same with Czeslaw Miłosz (poet Nobel laureate) - he wrote that, if he tried to live off his writing, he'd had to resort to writing commercial novels, which for him was dreadful. He chose to be a Slavic literature professor at Berkeley instead, and wrote poetry in spare time.

> Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history?

They normally couldn't in pre-revolutionary France; The Great Cat Massacre has the details.

Is writting a particularly representative example of cultural production? Back in the 40's only a quarter of the adult population even had a high school degree, now nearly everyone who has the temperament and interest to write can be trained. Thanks to the internet, a nearly infinite pool of writers have the opportunity for self expression, which they clearly value. At the same time, the economic value of undifferentiated writting approaches zero.

Contrast this with our current "golden age of television"--while costs are going down and quality is going up for viewers, the genuinely scarce and economically valuable skilled people who can make quality TV are being paid more. Overall the median salary for an artist today is higher than that of the average worker. You can believe that there are social issues that need to be overcome to improve the lives of people who work in and out of the arts, but it's hard to say that artists generally are living in "the worst of times"

And, of course, historically a large number of writers (those who weren't aristocratic dilettantes) had day jobs totally unrelated to writting. T.S. Eliot famously continuing to work in the sub-sub-basement of a bank for 3 years after publishing The Waste Land.

> Literary magazine sales are non-existent.

"To every age its art", as they wrote on some building in Vienna in the early 1900s. That is to say that maybe the literature represented by novels (and the associated ecosystem, like literary magazines) is behind us, there's nothing wrong with other art forms (video games, memes, twitter messages, social media posts, vlogs) taking its place. The same as classical music is almost dead, the art of painting is being confined to museums, cinema as we used to know it having been replaced by comics-related marketing materials and some made-for-fancy-festivals movies that nobody watches (thank God for TV series that have replaced what cinema used to be) etc etc.

If you genuinely think that video games, 'memes', twitter messages, social media posts or vlogs are art at all, let alone art on the level of the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all time, then you're part of the problem.

Classical music isn't 'almost dead'. The art of painting has never not been confined to museums and art galleries. Cinema most certainly has not be replaced with blockbusters - there have always been mass market blockbusters and films for the intelligent at the same time.

The TV series you claim have 'replaced what cinema used to be' are a far cry from art, the Breaking Bads are few and far between and rubbish like Game of Thrones (occasionally well-shot but very poor for at least the last three seasons) is not art.

>>the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all time<<

This is a bold and probably controversial assertion. I for one find it questionable on its face. Even limiting consideration only to literary art forms, the novel is not necessarily "the most artistic medium". For example William Shakespeare, widely held to be among the top literary artists ever to have worked in the English Language, worked in poetry and plays. And plays were a popular medium, analogous to television today, a way for a poet to make money-- It seems plausible to me that elite critics and artists in Shakespeare's time may have asserted (as you do about vlogs and social media posts) that plays were not art at all.

Art is what artists make of some medium-- potential new media like memes, and twitter messages and social media posts may not yet have been pushed to the level of art (and certainly not yet the level of great art), but artists have not (yet) had time much time to work with these new media...

The fate of classical music certainly depends on where you live, but it's not been doing very well in the US for a while. Public Radio (which used to be most people's exposure to classical music) has been playing less and less of it over the past couple of decades, the death of music stores means it's not that easy to browse recordings, and the new streaming services are much more pop music focused. You can still be a classical music fan but it takes work.

I think Spotify's selection of classical music is actually pretty good. Much better than any local music store where I live has ever had in my memory. (City of 400k people in NZ.)

We still have Radio NZ: Classical along with Radio NZ: National. This is the benefit of public service broadcasters, you know.

Its comical that Mark Cuban is saying that things like writing will be the jobs of the future after AI automates most jobs away. Writing and music were rendered virtually worthless by 1999, the so called "liberal arts jobs" were actually the first to go.

It's also funny he said that while playing up the power of machine learning and recent A.I. advances. I thought we already have algorithms that generate news articles, poetry and music?

The algorithms that 'generate news articles' don't: they abbreviate news articles.

The algorithms that 'generate music' don't: they generate noise that sounds a little like music but is completely derivative and unoriginal.

Was discussing this with a friend, why Patreon seems so much more difficult than Kickstarter. Kickstarter has as its premise, "Make this cool thing happen." It's a specific product (usually) with a specific outcome, and contributors may feel invested in achieving that outcome.

Patreon has as its premise, "Support this artist" (in many cases). It's more abstract, not tied to a particular product necessarily, and contributors may feel more like they're donating to someone's rent money rather than bringing a product into reality.

What do you think? Would there be some way for Patreon to tie donations more directly to product creation, or would that undermine the people who are using Patreon?

https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606295-What...

Cool, thanks! I think it's a little different from Kickstarter since with per-creation, supporters are still charged for every creation even if they may not like some of those creations. Whereas if I fund a Kickstarter for a board game, I'm choosing that specific project/creation.

On the flip side, there has never before been a point in history where one could make a good living riding miniature motorcycles around Omaha (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPr-L6BprRHBS0EIBxciCA), crushing things with a hydraulic press (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMDMoNu66_1Hwi5-MeiQgw), making robots that don't work (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ), or wrapping assorted proteins in bacon (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYjk_zY-iYR8YNfJmuzd70A). This probably just furthers your point somehow, as I'm not sure how any of this benefits culture, but there are lots of emerging "artists" who are making surprising incomes in this strange strange new world.

>But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years.

I was thinking about this in the context of the John Wanamaker quote -- "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half".

If online advertising becomes perfectly efficient, that might lead to a 50% (or more) reduction in the amount of funding available for ad-supported content.

I disagree. This would increase the value of the useful impressions and increase the demand for advertising from niche players who can now effectively target their market.

Totally agree with you. Right now, half the time and money that I invest in repairing the 100 year old house I'm living in is wasted due to poor quality workers. If the workers were higher quality, I'd probably spend more money not less (especially calculating in the fact that getting the reconstruction done faster could mean more rental income thus more money to spend). The same is with advertising.

Is it really harder to make money though? You take the best of the best in painting from 150 years ago, and none of these people were very well off. Gaugain, Van Gogh, Matisse, Braque. These aren't people who lived luxurious lives.

> Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper.

False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page.

I think in 1910 it would have been like counting people passing by the newspaper stand as "hits".

30-40% of people read to the end of the articles

Alright, different attack angle: you wouldn't have reached 70k readers in 1910 because the barrier to entry for mass circulation was much higher :)

And even if you had reached 700 readers with your 5-cent pamphlet, it would have cost you $50 to print the 1000-copy run, and you'd be $15 in the hole. Whereas you posted to Medium for free, with no editor or publisher in the way. You're out very little, and presumably your stuff is still out there for more people to find. Not true with your pamphlet in 1910.

>False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page.

I hope you're kidding and don't genuinely think that most people close links before fully loading the page on average.

"Most" was an exaggeration, but I'm willing to bet that the funnel is narrower than we'd expect.

Going from the moment when someone sees a link on the page to the moment when they decided to actually click it, to them waiting for the page to load and to the moment where they actually bother to scroll till the end... where by scroll I don't mean "Page Down/Page Down/...", but scrolling at a "reading pace".