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Comment by hairofadog | Hacker News Reader

I have long felt this way about movies, books, and music. I don’t have data to back it up, but it feels like there was a lot more quality, middle-budget content in the arts a few decades ago, vs. recent years in which everything seems to be a blockbuster or a flop. People dream of striking it rich, not of making a respectable living. It’s like startup culture has infiltrated nearly everything; if it’s not going to make you a billionaire, it’s not worth spending time on.

Some recent exceptions that make me feel hope for the middle class of the arts: Etsy, Netflix & Hulu, the world of podcasting. In all three of these places you can see people trying out ideas and making a living. It’s true that the businesses themselves – Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Amazon, etc. – are decidedly not middle class, the content creators on their platforms seem to be. (I can’t think of equivalents in books or music... SoundCloud? I got nothing for books.)

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It's an issue with engagement culture, more than startup culture I think... All the big players in media nowadays are fighting for a piece of your attention. The consequence is that the public is forced to filter way more who gets to have their free time, and make the conscious choice of checking out old preferences way less.

I remember years ago it was a usual thing for me to find myself bored and start checking out authors I liked (writers, singers, movie directors, whatever). I'd then find out what they've been up to and check out their new stuff. Nowadays I very rarely do that, because I always have an ever increasing pile of media to consume I can barely keep up with, so I don't go out to find new things.

In such an environment an artist can't choose to build an audience very slowly over decades because there's no retention. The only way to succeed is to explode virally and then keep pushing content constantly to remind people of your existence for as long as you can surf the wave.

The other thing is that what indie creators do now is different from what they used to. Blogs, Instagrams, YouTube clips, tweets, apps, games, etc. Making a whole movie, writing a whole book, nobody takes time to consume those things anymore, much less produce them.

>Making a whole movie, writing a whole book, nobody takes time to consume those things anymore, much less produce them.

Books maybe, but aren't people watching more movies than ever?

The thing is, they're also watching a smaller slice of the movies produced than ever...

Are they? I can't make it through a whole movie anymore, while I used to hit theaters at least once a week. Though maybe it is because of the lack of independent content, so a vicious cycle. Or maybe the streaming thing makes it too easy not to commit to the movie. Or maybe there is just so much selection that how do you even choose. Or, maybe I'm just getting old.

>Are they? I can't make it through a whole movie anymore, while I used to hit theaters at least once a week.

It's not theaters, between Netflix and piracy, there are tons of more movies consumed. And whole TV-series, binge watched series by series, each of which amounts to 5+ movies running time...

I guess he's referring to the length of a single episode but, in a world of streaming, that seems a little arbitrary. At home, nothing keeping you from pausing a film halfway and picking up the next day just like a TV series. Obviously telling a single story in 90-180 minutes is a different form from telling a storing over multiple seasons of 30-90 minute episodes in different from a miniseries or single-season series. But they're all just artistic (and financial) choices.

While there's arguably been an overall shift to shorter content, I don't really see a marked falloff in movies being produced.

It’s a different consumption mode. I watch short stuff during downtime. Lunch, waiting in line, etc.

But that’s not the good stuff. For the good stuff I turn to 18 hour audiobooks, real movies, deep technical articles.

Bite sized for staying in touch, long and in-depth for things that interest you.

Maybe it's because we've seen these movies before. For example, the revenge movie. Such as Peppermint, with a totally by-the-numbers plot. The twist is this time it's a female lead, but she could have been swapped out for Bronson/Lundgren/Stallone/Schwarzenegger/etc without changing a scene or a line of dialog and it would have been exactly the same :-/

Then I watched "The Foreigner", yup, same old revenge plot.

Book sales continue to decline in both physical and ebook format. I don't know if this is because people are reading less or because more piracy is occurring. On the other hand the sales of audiobooks continues to rise. At this point I think to have solid sales for a book it is almost a requirement to release an audiobook version. Unfortunately certain subject material doesn't work well as an audiobook (like most programming books).

I can only speak for myself, but for the past 10 years, audiobooks have been golden! I don't have time to read a book and nor do I want to. For example lying in bed with the light on parsing text, or sitting in a chair. It is boring when I could be resting my eyes in the dark and unwinding or even of late, I have been trying to make a wooden model of a boat. I still get to enjoy the benefits of a book passively.

I always find it difficult to multi-task with audio books. How do you manage with that?

Forgive my slow response! I think it just comes down to background noise. For example, people every day listen to Radio when driving, or have the news on in the background.

I don't think I could study something difficult with Audio Books or any noise, but for example, tinkering or life's chores like washing clothes, emptying dishwashers, hoovering, showering.... These tasks which must be done anyway can become secondary to an audio book which takes the prime brain space to the point that those tasks become "enjoyable". Especially if you find a good book!

I'm kinda the opposite. Modern music (to me) seems to be largely consisting of artists who cannot sing and have no tone to their voice, relying excessively on autotune and copious amounts of other digital tweaking of their voices. Playing any instrument other than a guitar seems to have vanished. Sadly, nobody plays a trumpet anymore (see Chicago and Herb Alpert). No synthesized horn sounds remotely like a trumpet and a skilled blower.

So I go back to artists that were great in the 60s and 70s and look for other albums of theirs - found a lot of stuff I really like that way.

I have no idea how the Family Guy makers keep coming up with such great material. The whole Bloofis and Klunt routine still cracks me up days later.

Somewhere in the late 90s to early 2000s, physical appearance was more important than actual talent for performing artists. The 70s and 80s had a fairly large amount of "ugly" artists.

I presume MTV changed that. You needed a great video to have a hit song. Hence Duran Duran, A-ha, etc.

Morten Harket also had an amazing voice though.

Having grown up in LA, I think I agree with you. In the 80s and 90s I knew a lot of people whose parents were involved with entertainment, and they weren't mega rich. They were middle class or upper middle class. They had consistent work at good wages, and they worked on films with small budgets that were in the theater for a week or two, which was long enough to make back their budget but not much more.

A lot of those people work on small budget stuff for Hulu and Netflix now (as you point out). I think the big streamers have replaced the big studios as far as funding small budget work (single digit millions budgets).

I think you slightly misunderstand the the phenomena. There is simply a glut of content. The tools to make content have been so democratized that anyone can easily make good entertainment.

In the days of very expensive post production equipment or studio recording equipment the cheap stuff simply could not exist. The blockbusters and middling content were sorted/binned accordingly. Blockbusters were milked and middling content was salvaged and polished.

These days are indeed different. There's so much content. "Middle class" most likely has to come up from the bottom instead of failed blockbusters thrown to newbies and fixers. Advertising goes a long way and gems in the rough don't get that. However, there's almost certainly more good content than ever before.

In part, globalization is a limiting function on what makes sense to invest in. We do have data that says we make fewer comedies than we used to (they account for far less of the revenue percentage as well) and the reason is, in part, that comedies don’t translate well. The last 10 or so years has been dire for the genre.

There are other reasons too but it’s no wonder that studios are most interested in investing in movies that will have broad international appeal.

Re: comedy, there’s definitely been a resurgence of stand up specials, but you’re right in that there haven’t been many blockbuster comedies.

Most likely driven by low production costs of stand-up comedy in comparison to movies, which makes them a great filler for streaming services.

Stand-up also sells tickets to a live audience.

Maybe there was less of it and more filters?

We have an abundance of new media. Making music went from needing a studio and finding a record label to needing nothing but a PC or even just smartphone and you can upload it to youtube or 50 other services.

Video is trivial as well though movies still take more effort than most are willing to put in but even so, the number of new movies or TV shows per year is way way up AFAICT.

Games is insane when you add in smartphones. Just like videos, games got easier to make. There are ~20k new games a month on smartphones. Sure, a game like GTA5 or Cyberpunk 2077 takes 400+ people multiple years, but just like video, documentaries that used to take a larger team of people are now regularly created by individuals and uploaded to youtube. Same with games. Lots of great indie games created by 1-4 people in 3 to 9 months. Especially with Unity and Unreal.

Hanging around on Reddit's /r/fantasy, I see a surprising number of people talking positively about self-published fantasy books. The coupled I tried reading—stellar Goodreads ratings aside—were utter garbage, but I bet there are some that are much better. Seems like some of these books (including the ones I disliked) are enough to earn the authors a living. Fantasy is a genre well-suited for series, so once you have an initial audience, you can rely on some level of recurring revenue for each subsequent book.

Publishing a book like this seems way more attainable than getting even a low level of success through traditional publishing a couple decades back.

There are a lot of good, free webnovels around. (E.g., “Mother of Learning.”) They might not appeal to everyone’s tastes though.

This may go beyond the arts, as it appears everyone wants to strike it rich and quick. I did not get the same sense when I started my working career 30 years ago. Most of us just wanted to do some interesting work. Now, getting rich seems to dominate thinking.

You hear different views of the cause of this, but may see increasing inequality as a cause. I'm convinced extreme financialization from money debasement is the primary undiagnosed issue.

I grew up in the 70s. I read lots of books about how people got rich and quite definitely wanted to do my own startup and make pots of money.

One difference is that people in those days simply did not know how to go about entrepreneurship, or thought it required some magical skills they didn't have. That's all changed because the info is so readily available on the internet.

The Internet has helped a lot by reducing the cost of reaching the public.

I think it was Patio11 who said "Now you can download your steam engine for free and rent a factory for $10/month".

For Music I would mention BandCamp and Spotify (as you did).

For Books, I'd mention Amazon (as nowadays it has become far easier to self-publish)

Of course, the fact that it's easy to publish on those platforms doesn't mean it's easy to make more than beer money on them. (And, truth be told, even a publishing contract for a book often doesn't mean you'll make a significant sum of money.)

> even a publishing contract for a book often doesn't mean you'll make a significant sum of money.

So true. Very, very few published authors don't also need a real job to pay the bills. JK Rowling is a unicorn.

My experience in the tech industry writing tech-ish books is that they've been very good for my career. Also. The direct money I've made from them has been a rounding error even though the one I've done through a publisher was apparently successful enough they asked me to do a new edition.

You're right, the indirect benefits can be career-making for tech books.

I thought about Amazon for self publishing, and that’s a good point. I could be wrong (and would be happy to be wrong), but it feels like most of the people in the making-a-living-but-not-striking-it-rich group there are turning out high-volume junk. When I think of the “middle class” of the arts, I think of the Duplass Brothers, for example, or the Blumhouse horror studio, where their goal seems to be to allow talented artists to experiment and make quality, if low-budget, media. My very possibly wrong impression of Amazon self publishers is that their success strategy is to churn out as much serialized content as fast as possible.

The reality is that making a comfortable five USD figures annually by publishing books whether self-publishing or going through a traditional publisher probably puts you at the very top of the curve.

Yes, and I assume at least some of the more successful self-published authors on Amazon are churning out material they can create a lot of quickly. I also assume they do a lot of marketing and have a reliable fan base in most cases.

It's not wrong at all, and you'll find that strategy being discussed on Amazon creator forums.

It's the difference between product and culture.

Culture makes you think, changes your world view, surprises you, challenges you, and is driven by imagination.

Product fills a gap, fuels a transaction, and is driven by cash.

There used to be more of a balance, but now the scales are tilted heavily towards product.

Is the ratio of product/culture the right metric? If the amount of product increased 100x but the amount of culture 10x, are we really worse off?

Its not just arts. Its a winner take all in most industries globally now. Lots of huge corps dominate everything, not many local or even regional businesses.

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