There won’t be a Goddamn creator economy if we don’t invest directly in creators | Hacker News Reader

There won’t be a Goddamn creator economy if we don’t invest directly in creators

pizzaparty.substack.com

35 pointsjoanwestenberg47 comments

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Was with this author right up until it became another pitch for NFT's.

"NFTs allow us to give value to the things we own so they aren't just data floating around on servers somewhere"

I'm skeptical:

https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-prob...

Workers need wages, not sales. NFTs, even if they weren't hot garbage, fail on dimensional analysis grounds.

Expand on the last comment a bit?

NFTs are effectively provenance and identifying distinctness, if I understand them right (might be a stretch)?

My take on nfts are that they are just the virtual version of the art market driven by the same dynamics, people with money to spare and actually looking to collect but mostly money laundering and tax evasion. I don't really feel like theirs a place for the average Joe retail crowd and they'll prob disappear as the hype dies down

Spoken like someone who doesn’t know the first thing about NFTs

Money/time vs money/work.

When someine is retained with the former, they are free to work on larger or smaller projects without endangering there livelihood (in a first order way). When they are paid according to the latter, however, they are incentived to lower risk by making a small stream of minutae, essentially mimicking the former.

Given some sort of power law, the long tail is relatively risk averse by definition, and thus compelled to live and work "at subsistence", putting out a stream of relatively low effort stuff. The stars, however, can save up to produce fewer, more expensive things. This promulgates the status quo, maintaining the power law.

The profit angle is wrong. While creators would no doubt love a steady income, at every point in history the greatest art was produced when a few geniuses sacrificed their lives for it. Art as a day job not only produces mediocrity, it does so at a scale that drowns out true genius. Sucks for the creators, but throwing money at self proclaimed "creators" just gets you a giant pile of shit. It may not be fair, but true creators will press on in any environment, it's who they are. Cutting the money just trims the wannabes.

I think the author fundamentally misunderstands the ecosystem, one of their suggestions:

> venture based funding for artists in the same way we fund startups.

This already exists in the form of record deals or contracts paying artists such as sculptors or painters for their next N pieces. It's worth noting that, in music at least, every year more artists are succeeding without this kind of investment and the percentage of music backed by a label is dropping[0].

The extreme supply of artists vs. demand will always mean most artists cannot be invested in, I'm not sure the OP has actually made the case that the problem their discussing exists.

[0] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/slowly-but-surely-the...

I'm underwhelmed by the NFT crowd. They're frantically trying to create artificial scarcity so they can Make Money Fast. There are now NFT pet rocks, called Ether Rocks. Prices are now up to US$1M. Somehow I suspect wash sales to pump up the price. The end of this fad may be in sight.

I kind of liked the Filecoin/Arweave distributed storage idea. Except that nobody seems to actually use it for storage much.

What an odd time to worry about creative work drying up. Artists and 'creators' are becoming absurdly wealthy nowadays with every imaginable way to monetize content. YT pays ~$5/1k views, twitch, NFTs, substack, insta, affliations, etc. The barriers to being a creator now are so low that anyone can do it as a hobby, which is fantastic. The author is pining for the very systems that already exist.

You're wildin my dude. Every thing you listed exists to leech value from creatives by selling an extremely peaky reward distribution as linear. But especially NFTs holy heck, that's entirely a vehicle for money laundring and speculation, the artists are just around to give the illusion of legitimacy.

So are art shops selling paints and brushes in the business of leeching value from artists as well by your estimation? It's easy to look at how wealthy some of these platforms have become and get greedy, but at the same time they've provided artists/creators with historic opportunities.

Distribution is quite different to supplying raw materials or tools. While some of the products mentioned provide some authoring tools, they're attached to a distribution channel that's somewhat controlled by the platform. (Substack being the notable exception, and NFTs being a difference of kind.)

No because they are actually providing value without strings attached, obviously an artist needs tools to perform their art.

I can just stream or upload content all I want for free! No strings attached as far as I can tell

You cant get paid if you upload for free. Kinda undermines the “ Artists and 'creators' are becoming absurdly wealthy nowadays” argument. Theres all kinds of strings when compensation becomes involved.

> that's entirely a vehicle for money laundring and speculation

This statement agrees with my priors, but can you point me to any evidence, even anecdotal if it's reliable?

Agree. Some of these YouTube creators are making absolute FU money. They don't talk about it because if they disclosed how much they made , they would not seem so relatable to their audience. Also, product placement, affiliate offers...tons of ways to make money.

The barrier to being a creator on youtube getting paid is much higher than it was in 2015. The minimums insure most will never make it as google takes 100% of those ads.

Instagram is falling out now. The market is drying up. People want real experiences.

It still basically follows power law distribution. Most are not getting wealthy, only the top 1%. Top 10% maybe make a living.

I think your comment is even more odd (and detached, really) since it’s coming from the assumption that the current system is fair and not curated or incentivised by biased algorithms.

What exactly is the 'current system' though? I referenced a few systems/technologies, which are only a fraction of what is available. My assumption isn't that there is a single system being supervised by a biased algorithm, which is incorrect. Regardless of the fairness of any of these options, though, they provide the monetary incentives necessary to support creators. I imagine the dynamics of any individual business relationships could swing either way, such is life.

Exactly how many times this week is a whiny "buy our shit" article from Pizza Party going to hit the front page?

"Supporting artists by enabling and funding their transition to tokenized creativity."

is this more NFT bullshit, why yes it is

If you are full of FAANG/crypto/etc money and wanna support an artist, hi, I draw shit and put it online for free without any "tokenizing" bullshit, and I have a Patreon, and will also gladly accept large donations via my Paypal account.

my stuff: http://egypt.urnash.com

my patreon: https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash

my paypal: egypt@urnash.com

hell, if you wanna play VC, you can pay for me to rent some space in my city's gallery row for a couple months, print out some of my stuff, and I'll give you a healthy cut of what I manage to sell.

We dont need to "invest" in creators. Investors want ROI. We need better ways to pay creators directly or via advertising that mostly (or completely) goes to the creators.

Anything less is exploitation.

Imagine we tokenized all digital music so that now people can directly buy an NFT from an artist instead of paying for Spotify or a record label.

Now there are 100 billion NFTs representing every song ever made. Who is going to promote your album in a world where every artist has their own brand? Do the artists want to take on the role of marketing as well in a super crowded market?

Who is going to build integration into a cloud service so you can play the song on any device or through Siri/Alexa? Or a recommendation engine? Or just basic software to create and share playlists? Apple Music or Spotify do more to increase the total amount of music people listen to than any artist. Of course they will take their cut.

Like if artists hate the middlemen so much, there is nothing stopping them from going direct to customers with creative work. Even without NFTs you can throw up 10 MP3s or images on your website and charge a fee to download. Guess what, now you're competing for attention on the internet with everyone else - good luck lol. NFTs don't change any of the fundamental reasons why artists get paid so little. Like in many businesses with lots of competition or too much supply, the power lies with the distributor because the creators are oversupplied.

Creators whining about being poor and how we just aren't working hard enough to support them and patronize them and give them money and "supports the artist by giving them what they need to create their best work." (another quote from OP substack)... boohoo :( You think my boss gives me all the time and support I need to "do my best work" and a gentle pat on the back when I miss a deadline? LOL.

Well you are payed for your work and many of these artist used to be as well not that long ago. The problem with spotify is that only few people make money on it. Dont get me wrong i also enjoy just streaming anything i want but situation for musicians got objectively a lot worse. Spotify taught people not pay for music anymore and youtube is teaching people to not go to concerts anymore.

The super popular make a lot money on streaming so they do it and the rest has to be there to even exist for audiences. Its like if you dont have linkedin page you are probably not a real person and certainly not credible job aplicant.

You end up with a lot fewer professional musicians. Those who used to make normal salary doing some niche music used to be able to manage with concerts and cd sales. Now they are all doing it as hobby and spotify/google is taking this money.

I'll be honest, I couldn't understand exactly what was being proposed there. What exactly does the author want to do?

It sounds like they want to replicate the old system of corporate/government/aristocratic patronage with some vaguely defined VC patronage that would work through the magic of crypto and blockchain, I guess.

I mean artists have complaining about getting paid for art as long as there has been money and art, and yet there keeps being more art. Maybe I am cynical but I am dubious crypto is going to fix this.

Let artists sell art using NFT to do away with the middleman and make money via digital sales directly without a 'platform' that takes a commission.

It's a stupid idea for all the well documented reasons NFTs are, but the idea of direct digital sales of art without middleman platforms may have some merit I guess.

Not just disintermediation: the author sees tokens as the only way to capture surplus value (contrasted to a pittance of tips from Bandcamp).

But despite this, they somehow forgot to mention crowdfunding. Like raising money for an album ahead of time, which is precedented. Strange omission considering the strong similarity to venture funding, which is mentioned. Though I guess that usually doesn't include a way for third parties to cash in...

of course it veers right into a crypto pitch but to ignore that for a second, I don't think we have a lack of art when it comes to the sheer quantity of it. I don't think we have lived in an era with more mediocre creative expression, or cheaper means to do it.

I'd very much be in favor of targeted funding of the arts, in particular in communities that lack access to public art. Reinvest in our museums and libraries in places that have turned into deserts.

I can already see the comments about elitism and how someone selling his meme collection for 50 million dollars on a blockchain is super valuable for society but I don't buy it. Rather than making more stuff, which nobody can consume anyway at this point given that the day only has 24 hours, I'd be in favour of rebuilding some infrastructure to give people access to some of the best art that is underappreciated.

> I'd very much be in favor of targeted funding of the arts, in particular in communities that lack access to public art. Reinvest in our museums and libraries in places that have turned into deserts.

This actually does happen, and has been happening for years. Just do a Google search for "center for the arts" and you'll see that there are a lot of non-profits that provide art education, scholarships, exhibition spaces, etc. to local communities.

I don't know the author, but I find that a lot of the complaints about the "creator economy" really boil down to people who think because they create they should be rich.

Not every person who paints or makes music earns millions, just as not every engineer who writes code earns millions.

I don’t think mediocre creative expression is the same problem that you do. It’s not that the art is mediocre, although some obviously is. It’s that it serves a more specific niche. Rather than making art that everybody loves or hates, it’s easier to make art that a small group of people really love, and everybody else doesn’t matter. There doesn’t need to be a universal standard anymore of what’s good vs. mediocre vs. bad. And that’s a very good thing.

wasn't my intention to just prioritize conventional art. I like niche, original stuff a lot, but I don't think there is more original, niche art today (maybe unintuitive take), or at least it is harder to find.

Can't remember who made this point but, music is now because of the 'creator economy' system so optimized for virality and attention that the medium itself has changed almost every genre for playlist optimization. The 'concept album' is practically gone. You will today have a fairly hard time find tracks that are very long or very short simply because it's not a great fit for typical streaming consumption. I find it now more difficult paradoxically to find great rap than I did probably 20 years ago.

I'm confused about the suggestion of VC investment into artists. One of the big issues with VC funding is that the pressure an investor can put on a company's direction, pacing, growth, product vision, etc. Wouldn't that be just as bad, if not worse, regarding VC investment in individual artists?

I mean in a sense traditional record labels are already exactly that for the music industry, it's the same financing and payoff model (record labels front an advance to the artist and recoup the advance and more on album sales/revenue share from touring, 90% of signed artists will likely flop but the 10% that take off could become the next Beyonce or Justin Bieber)

> If you can instead buy a lossless audio file as a token, unlocking community access and a creator-audience relationship, and giving you the ability to on-sell your assets in a secondary market that continues to support the creator through residuals - the benefits to the creator economy are enormous.

This sounds like it was written by the Creator version of the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator.

I enjoy music. I can buy a digital copy of the songs I like and enjoy them in perpetuity. The artists get paid for the download. Simple and sweet.

Why would I want to buy a tokenized lossless audio file that I treat like an "asset" that I can "on-sell" into a secondary market?

"Community access"? If I'm a fan of somebody, chances are there are communities of fans online (and in real life) that I can participate in. I don't need to pay thousands of dollars for an NFT to unlock interaction with other fans.

> Let's support artists and their work: decentralized or not. If we want more of it, let's give them a reason to keep making stuff for us by supporting the people who make art - because they're genuinely irreplaceable.

There are more "creators" and "art" than ever before. If you think about it, the biggest threat to creators today is not their ability to monetize their "art" if it proves attractive to the marketplace. The platforms that the author is complaining about are incredibly efficient monetization engines that are minting millionaires of some creators.

The biggest threat to creators today is that the supply of their "art" vastly exceeds the demand, so creating "art" that is appealing enough to be commercially successful is getting harder and harder.

If anything, this is the very reason that investors are foolish to invest directly in artists. If you're a billionaire who is a fan of a creator, you can be their patron. There's no appeal to being their banker.

The situation can be easily explained by supply and demand, isn't it?

There are so many supply of creators exceeds the demand. There are so many wanna-be YouTubers so YouTube don't need to pay most of them.

Whatever the solution would be, it won't be the ponzi scheme... I mean NFT.

"Establishing an ecosystem of venture based funding for artists in the same way we fund startups.

Supporting artists by enabling and funding their transition to tokenized creativity."

I mean, ideally, this is what record labels and A&R people are supposed to be doing. They just sort of don't anymore. The idea is that you take some of the money from established artists and use it to develop new talent, most of which fails, but a few become the next generation of established artists. Somewhere along the line the record industry was subsumed by apple music, which of course fails to give anything back to the community it leaches off of.

I think it's sorta the opposite. Artists are overpaid relative to the work that goes into making art. Look at at some of these recent artwork sales. tens of millions of dollars for art that frankly sucks. Gadis only wrote a few books and made a living off that alone. Some even make a nice, comfortable living from just a single published work (Harper Lee, ray bradbury). Glenn Greenwald makes millions from subcribers jsut to write thesame old predictable stuff. It's great work if you can get it. Paul McCartney's net worth has surged in decades despite not producing any noteworthy new music . All from licensing.

You're basically taking the superstars of a field, though. Like walk into a bookstore, and most of those authors don't make $$. Same if you go to a local art fair. Same with acting.

> despite not producing any noteworthy new music

It's in the eye of the beholder; his latest albums are some of my favorite. Not sure how much he gets from Spotify though, so not arguing your original point.

>> Establishing an ecosystem of venture based funding for artists in the same way we fund startups.

Pretty surprising proposal coming from an artist. I mean, won’t the same failures of venture apply - pushing for bigger returns and less niche products (works of art)? How long until all the VCs are chasing the next Damien Hirst instead of supporting diverse and interesting creators who simply make work that will never resonate with critics or get a billion views on YouTube.

This is completely backwards. Everyone should be able to make art, nobody should NEED to profit from it in order to live. Only then will our art be a true reflection of human potential, rather than a scarcity mindset.

I can’t get past the premise. Why do we need a “creator” economy instead of just a regular economy?

I’d argue that there are more people creating now more than any time in history.

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