There is observable relative movement of where the money is going in the "art economy" and it's both going down in total and a greater proportion is going toward the top "Mid-level" creators in every industry are being rapidly killed off
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
I mean sure this is a subset of what's happening to the whole economy -- the middle class is vanishing, corporations are posting record stock prices while everyone struggles to get paid I posit that's because it's one general phenomenon -- the price of labor diving toward zero
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
The role of Big Tech in "disintermediating" against "rent-seekers", the ethos of "I can always find someone to do what you do for slightly cheaper, until the price reaches the lowest level it possibly can", the whole Uber/Fiverr/AirBNB phenomenon
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
And I don't get how people don't see the conversation about IP and piracy as the *same conversation* "Well, the price point you have to compete with is $0 All you're actually charging for is the convenience of not having to look for a torrent"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @lawnerdbarak and
People want to pay for art they like. That remains true. And it's how people with Patreon and large, niche, fanbases work. Sci Show is free to watch on YouTube, and yet it has Patreons.
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Replying to @phyphor @lawnerdbarak and
People *want* to pay for art they *like*, but in the old days they *had* to pay for art they were merely curious enough to take a look at (And then the ones who actually were fans and really liked it paid more)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
The latter model is objectively "worse for fans" because you have to pay more money, but that also makes it better for creators Once you hit a certain ceiling it is, I hate to say, a zero sum game
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
Like shit "selling merch" or whatever isn't new In the old days, if you liked the band you had to buy the album first just to hear the music, then you ALSO bought the merch Removing the first step is objectively taking money away from the band
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
Like yeah if you look at it from a purely consumer POV it "sucked" and you were always getting "ripped off", but you had no choice As you say, then, as now, people still paid for stuff and people still made a living It's just the greater burden was shifted onto the consumer
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
Like that's the sense you get, anecdotally, when you talk to fans about the '90s and before Being into music was a constant tax, on your paycheck Back in the day you had to spend so much more just to keep up with shit Buying all these albums you listened to once and hated
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It was the expense of being a fan It sucked, especially if you were poor, although you could get around the financial barrier to entry with a little effort (It's that price discrimination thing again -- bootlegs and mixtapes existed but they took effort to get)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
But, I mean, that money was keeping the industry alive All the bullshit albums you bought that weren't worth it and all the movies you went to see in theaters that weren't worth it and so on, that was people's paychecks
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Replying to @arthur_affect @phyphor and
Because the number of people who've heard of something is always so much higher than the people who really like it, at every level -- it's not people paying for music they *like* that keeps art afloat It's people paying for music they *don't like*
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