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Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero.

Quite. The big gain of copyright was to liberate artists from that to some degree and put them on an economic footing of productivity, where their work could be valued for its commercial potential, with the reasonable proviso that people who wanted to enjoy it would pay to purchase it in some form. Despite the flaws of the publishing industry this worked pretty well and there was a cultural explosion that paralleled the industrial revolution.

In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers.

I read the original Pomplamoose piece and while I respected the position of 'hey we're a startup, and while we haven't made it we are making it, plus being in a band is awesome' it nonetheless radiated an air of desperation. The cold hard reality is that you can do a 2 month tour, play to packed houses of paying fans, and still lose $10,000. Criticisms that they paid too much for the stage show are misplaced; it costs money to hire those things, and you need some of those things so that people say your show was fun and exciting rather than dull and boring. People go to a concert to be entertained, after all. Traditionally, bands signed deals with labels because labels have the capital and know-how to promote music, much as studios have the capital and know-how to put out films and so forth. It's very very hard to build up that capital organically, and it's also very hard to produce a marketable product without a capital investment.

In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers.

Indeed. I think the problem of artist market value isn't supply, but that people have this idea that creating something is somehow 'free,' that creative work involves no actual work and therefore should just magically fall from one's arse.

"Fun" doesn't put food on the table. And creative work is incredibly labor intensive, perhaps more so than any other job I've done, from factory labor to line cook. Because it never ends. When my shift was over at a 9-to-5, that was it, but as a creator? It never switches off; you constantly have to be revising, creating, brainstorming, and promoting to have any shot at making it.

One of the only guys I knew who was actually making enough off RPGs to call it a living was working 40-60 hours a week on top of a day job in (I think) insurance. Another guy I know who manages to eke by does it by writing sometimes as much as 10k words or more a day for as many as two to three different books at a time plus freelance work (by comparison, Neil Gaiman, best-selling fiction author, recently wrote that he considered 2k to be a very good day). When I was still writing I generally had to make about 2.5k to 3k a day to keep up with any kind of profitable deadline, and all for books that at best were likely to make a few grand in the full life of product.

And then everyone wonders why people quit the market ...

First, you remind me of someone I went to high school with. Are you from Regina, Sask? If so, next time we're in the same city, I would love to reacquaint with you. My email is in my profile, please use it!

Second, this reminds me of a conversation I had with a tattoo artist friend of mine. We had had a few drinks and he started ruminating about the state of his industry, most notably the sudden surge of people who would book slots, wait for a few months, show up twenty minutes late woefully prepared to be tattooed, and then complain about paying him $150 an hour.

He explained how he would love to tell them that they weren't buying an hour of his time; they were compensating him for the twenty five years he spent sketching, taking art classes, and learning a wide variety of mediums. Moreover, it wasn't as if they showed up and he slapped some flash on them - his work was custom, involved research, and a significant amount of planning. Alas, if he dared, he feared that word would spread that he was a prima donna, an elitist and a fake artist.

And, tattoo is one of very few fields where visual artists can make a good living...

> I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers.

I really don't expect anyone to pay me for the open-source experimentation I put on github for free. But if you want me to write the boring line-of-business application for your company, then I want to get paid.

Yet the attitude you express here is used as a justification for the suppression of pay in this industry. Open source is a boon and a bane in that regard, because companies are unlikely to distinguish between the two contexts you note. And they have a large source of useful idiots who will happily play along.

Plus that's how we get shitty OpenSSL code and the like, that everybody uses, but nobody bothers improving...

You seem to assume that there are only 2 kinds of software: "fun experiments" and made-to-order business software. What about mass-market software that's not so fun to write? Who's going to pay for the development effort if everyone can just download it from a torrent site? Or do you think that all mass-market software is inherently fun to write, be it an RDBMS, graphics editor, Web browser, backup software, etc.?

Maybe mass-market software will no longer be a profitable category of software in the future. I don't see that it would be such a tragedy to have to use good-enough commodity word processors or image editors.

They are a business. If they didn't make money, or even lost money, then they didn't take care of the financial side of things. Maybe they didn't charge enough. Maybe if they charged the amount necessary to earn a profit, then there is no market at that price point. The same applies to every commercial endeavor. Just like startups, everyone has a right to start something, but no inherent right to business continuity if you can't figure out the economics of the business you want to build.

If the consumers are unwilling to shell out the amount necessary for a ticket to see a show at a profitable price point, then we've voted with our dollars that we don't think it's worth it.

The truth is that the market for entertainment is an accumulatory one. Each year, new entertainment is created, diluting the value of entertainment created in previous years. It's an unfortunate truth that entertainment persists because the marginal cost of reproduction is practically zero, meaning that once piece of entertainment is created, it doesn't take much to sustain the availability of that entertainment for consumers ad infinitum. Musicians aren't competing against other musicians active in the market. They are competing against every musician that ever lived and recorded music. Not only that, the market for music is competing against all other entertainment markets, which also suffer from this deflationary effect.

Any way you slice it, the price people are willing to pay per unit of entertainment keeps going down and will keep going down.

The reason other markets, like the enterprise pay better, is because most of those other industries are in the market of generating free time (time === money) at the end of the day. They are generating free time to consume for their owners and money to apply to activities to fill that free time. They also generate efficiencies that allow consumers to have more free time. People are willing to pay for things that generate time and money. Entertainment does neither for the consumer, thus the demand is lesser.

Furthermore, the cost of creation is not proportional to the entertainment value of the creation. Just compare meme subreddits to a Michael Bay movie.

I don't know about you, but I'm not terribly bothered if many people can't make a living as a musician. There is absolutely no lack of good music out there that everyone who isn't a neophile could not be entertained for the rest of their life. This doesn't mean that new music shouldn't be created, but that the bar for the "quality" (by whatever measure of quality you may prefer) of music that will earn you a living is that much higher.

The good news is that all the people working to increase efficiencies in the world is helping generate more free time for the average person and helping reduce the cost of the instruments and equipment necessary to make music, such that the creation of good music is increasingly within the purview of Joe Q. Consumer.

I don't know about you, but allowing more and more people to entertain themselves through the act of creation instead of consuming the creations of others, to be a great improvement on the world where only those that can make a living at something have the time and means to create.

For whatever it's worth, I used to listen to music hours upon hours per day for many years and haven't really listened to much music in 3-4 years now because I prefer silence when I am creating (coding).

Creation is the hardest form of entertainment to compete against and never has creation been so accessible to so many.

> I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers.

It's not though. Labor prices are set by the interaction of supply and demand, and quite simply the supply of creativity (especially music) far outstrips the demand for it. The vast majority of the general public would probably be perfectly content with there only be 1000 musicians in the world, so there's not inherently high demand.

On the flip side, there is huge supply. People make music because its fun——lots of people make it as a hobby. Very few people write actual business-ready apps just for fun.

This interaction of supply and demand applies just as much to programmers. Salaries for game programmers aren't lower because game programming is somehow easier or in less demand, but because it seems fun so the supply is huge.

Until you somehow convince most people to not be hobbyist artists (reducing supply) or to listen to way more different music (increase demand), it's going to be impossible to find lucrative business-to-fan business models.

> Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero.

What is the alternative for 'begging'? That's a loaded term for what could be considered 'advertising' or 'self-promotion' instead. Do you suppose artists are entitled to cash that falls out of the sky proportional to the effort they put it? Where, then, would be the accountability that what they do is actually valuable to someone? Would you rather art be funded through a government grant system, where people are "begging" and dissembling and using political connections to get their money?

Don't confuse value with price. The price is zero because the supply is incredibly high. Partly because the tools have been democratized; it's easy to pick up a guitar and start playing, or a digital camera and start snapping pictures.

I think if you want something an artists produces, you should be willing to pay for it. If it's not worth paying for, so be it. Just don't take it anyway.

That's all artists want. It's not the least bit unreasonable of them.

>Do you suppose artists are entitled to cash that falls out of the sky proportional to the effort they put it?

No, I just suppose that artists are entitled to us paying their asking price for what they offer -- or not getting it at all, if you can't be bothered with paying.

Or, to put it in another way, it's the consumer that is NOT entitled to free art when that art is put up on sale by its creators.

But if the consumer can't choose their price, then the market can't work. Usually you have choice between nearly-equivalent alternatives at different prices with more or less bells-and-whistles. But with art, a nearly-equivalent alternative violates copyright, so you can't choose a cheaper alternative, because there isn't one. Because everybody else is banned from selling one.

The answer can't be anarchy obviously, but it also can't be installing spyware on every device to stop copying. The larger public has shown that they're absolutely willing to throw every single artist under the bus in order to free themselves from the shackles of copyright.

The intersection of art and business is somewhat really weird. You're making something whose entire reason for existing is making people feel nice in some way, but it's never an actual physical product like a bar of chocolate. It's an experience. Depending on who you ask, that is either the most important product of civilization, or some useless baggage tying up useful hands. You need to make the former group pay you money. Fortunately, people understand that things cost money and should be willing to pay you a reasonable price. Unfortunately, most middle-class and above people fall in the latter camp, so most of your fans will be poor and for them a reasonable price might be less than what you want to get.

Personally, I have never paid more than twenty bucks for a game.

>But if the consumer can't choose their price, then the market can't work.

Well, who said it has to work as a competitive free market merely for any particular and very specific album/song, instead of at the genre level?

Besides, buying it at the artist's asking price has worked for 8+ decades -- for as long as there were physical media.

> But if the consumer can't choose their price, then the market can't work. Usually you have choice between nearly-equivalent alternatives at different prices with more or less bells-and-whistles.

Actually, unless you have competing sources of near substitutes, a market can't work (or at least have the properties that are held to make a market ideal) period; allowing purchasers to set prices against the wishes of sellers doesn't solve this problem, it just changes the details of the failure.

To the extent that works of art are not easily substituted commodities, they simply do not support an ideal market.

> But with art, a nearly-equivalent alternative violates copyright

No, it doesn't, unless its actually derivative. Copyright protects against copying, not coincidence.

I should not here: I was not using that term to be derisive, though many others have used it in that sense when targeting Patreon in particular. I actually have seriously considered a Patreon project myself, and I've crowdfunded multiple books, so I've no mean view of it personally, only of a society that has made such things necessary.

And indeed, Patreon is a good example of the same principle: KS and Patreon creators get no end of shit on, often worst of all from their own fans and even paid supporters. You are demonized for asking for money, and then demonized for not offering more than you can afford for that money, demonized for not being transparent enough, picked apart and demonized for what figures you do release, and then further demonized for failing to live up to that expectation on release.

Absoutely. I've published a small game experiment for iOS and didn't expect many purchases after bumping the price up to 99 cents, but the drop-off at even that price point is remarkable. If Apple ever sent me a check I didn't notice it. Acquaintances would say "wow, cool!" and then not decide to spend a dollar and try it out. It seems that an enormous amount of self-promotion would be required to make better results likely.

The market clearly does not favor this kind of product, but the amazing thing is how often I still hear about friends wanting to get into selling software or games to consumers. I always tell them to consider getting into the enterprise market instead, which is comparatively boring but has a reasonable chance of providing non-trivial income. Say what you will about corporations, but they actually pay for software.

My advice to anyone with similar options is to sell software to businesses and maybe hardware to consumers. This effectively rules out most entertainment products. Some people are not discouraged by that, but those people will almost certainly be working day jobs for the foreseeable future anyway. I'm lucky to have enough free time and money where continuing work on these projects is possible without compromising on quality of life, but the odds are they will never be a primary source of income and I'm OK with that.

Oh, the entitlement.

You simply didn't create something engaging enough. Popular games make a lot of money.

Take Minecraft - it was created by one guy and made hundreds of millions of dollars before he actually turned it over to a team.

Whining about models and price schemes and markets is pointless. If you want to make money, you have to create something people are willing to pay for.

Notch made a good game, sure, but Minecraft basically won the lottery. It's not a good example of anything. There are lots of other great games that fall victim to the phenomena described by guscost.

When discussing the mobile market, and especially the iOS mobile market, we are talking about a consumer who typically thinks nothing of dropping $4.50 for a 12 oz. cup of badly roasted espresso with steamed milk. That they don't want to pay $0.99 for something they think is "really neat" and arguably longer lasting than a cup of "cappuccino" says more about their (consumers') sense of entitlement than the value of the products under discussion.

That is only a small fraction of the mobile market. A much larger fraction is people who save money for a few months to afford a powerful handheld computer. And for them 4.50$ is closer to two lunches, than a single cappuccino.

The market of automobile buyers includes the market of Tesla buyers as well as the market of Toyota buyers.

I edited it down, but this:

> The market clearly does not favor this kind of product

Is the same as what you're saying. Obviously I didn't create something engaging enough to gain traction organically and become profitable. The point of the story was just to provide another anecdote supporting the claim that that is a difficult thing to do in the entertainment industry. I hope it did not come across as whining.

All of this, end to end. We're seeing the same subsistence-level "success" phenomenon in video games now, though. The giants make money, the occasional odd hit turns into something, and everybody else had better be happy with selling too few copies to pay your staff at $3 a pop during a Steam sale, because paying $5 is Just Too Much, Ha Ha Ha.

I guess we could all go make free to play games that are designed to exploit consumers and get them on an addiction treadmill. Because that's ethical.

I've been playing and designing games of several kinds since childhood, including dabbling in tabletop RPG writing/design. So I hear you. I'd love to know if your experience was with your own original RPG or did you just work on adventures/expansions for other systems (D&D, etc)?

I once took a shot at writing and publishing a GURPS compatible adventure, independently, and gave up because SJG either forebade it or simply made it too annoying. And that was the "final straw" beyond already knowing that my total hourly ROI for the project almost certainly would have been bad. Far too bad for a craft that takes such a rare and above-average set of intellectual skills.

However I was "lucky" also to have been programming since childhood, and that is one field that historically does pay well for one's time.

I don't see why this is so weird. Usually, people do things they enjoy for free, and if you want them to do something unpleasant, then you have to pay them to do it. Artists are essentially asking to get paid to do something they enjoy (for some value of "enjoy"). That's a nice gig if you can get it, but I can see why it would be a hard sell to consumers.

It's weird because how I feel about my work has absolutely nothing to do with its market value. Zero. I work for money. If you want to experience my work, you'll pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't get to see it. My enjoyment in creating the work is the same whether or not you pay for it. Your enjoyment is what you're paying for. If you don't want it enough to pay for it, it's your loss.

This is equally true of my work as a scientist, as a software engineer, as a poet (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) and as a novelist (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...).

The market value of what I create (science: moderate, software: very high, poetry: almost zero, novel: barely more than almost zero) has nothing at all to do with my enjoyment of the act of creation, which is extremely high in all cases.

Some of my work I do for free for various reasons of my own, but mostly you have to pay for it if you want to have it, and I get to say that because it's my work. I own it. I made it. I created it. I'm an arrogant prick and if you don't like that... too bad. Go rip off someone else's work. I'm making good money from the stuff people are willing to pay for, and having lots of fun with everything I do, and so the loss is all on the side of those who can't appreciate the value of my other work.

If you think you deserve the output of my creativity without paying me simply because I enjoy the act of creation, the problem is all on your side.

You seem really defensive about this.

Presumably some employer pays you to do your work as a scientist and a software engineer, and in the absence of that incentive, you would not do identical work.

Making a work of art takes a lot of discipline and, often, drudgery. There are many tasks which are not enjoyable in the least bit. There's burnout, depression, writer's block. Many (most?) great works of art got completed only because their authors knew they had to complete them to make a living.

Furthermore, enjoyment that comes from creating art requires your more basic needs to be satisfied (food, shelter, sleep, health, etc.). We can't just pay artists nothing and expect them to enjoy their art they way they would if their basic needs were satisfied. How much art can you create if your stomach is empty, if you're worrying about being able to afford your child's healthcare, if you come back tired at 6 pm from your day job?