The creative fields rake in billions of dollars a year. Movies, games, books. Okay, maybe not books. And up until the last decade, TV has been declining as well. However, it is still an industry where many make a modest to comfortable living.
So why are the artists still starving? Is it to hold onto the stereotype, or is this the best running example of how trickle-down economics works?
I posit 4 non-mutually exclusive theories based on third-party observation.
- Art is not essential for life - though it is essential for living
- The revenue funnels are collapsing
- The cost of creating good art is too high
- The cost of obtaining any art is too low
I would like to be proven wrong, or have an alternative path to salvation. However aware I am that I am part of the problem here.
Theory 1 of why the artists are still starving:
Though art is essential for living, it is not essential for life.
The art itself, the music or podcast you listen to, the piece you hang in your living room, the books you’ve decided to buy a physical copy of, enriches life. Art is the best vehicle for widening horizons and forcing empathy. But it is not essential for life itself. Something else always trumps it.
Unlike starvation or the weather, you won’t die from not having art. Your life will be impacted, but you will survive. This means that people who spend on art are spending for a secondary reason outside of the actual piece itself. The most obvious piece is social standing.
Picture how the rich buy paintings that are worth millions. They may love the art itself, and the art has value. But the value of the art is predicated on how much social capital it can afford its new owner. They would hang it in a very visible place in their home or their office, a place where guests frequent. The guests would take a look at the painting, admire how nice it looks, but gasp at the price tag and the exclusivity of it, giving the owner an ego boost in that moment.
This example translates at every income level. People buy merch to feel like they are part of a community. We go to the cinemas or concerts cause we want to talk to our friends or hang it over their heads about the experience. The value of art becomes less about the art and more about the social benefits of engaging with or having that art.
In a sense, you can put information into the same bucket. Where people want more information, all the information, all the time, preferably cheap or quick. But it has to be accurate, as it is not the information itself that is valuable, but what it can do for your ego.
I say this like it is a bad thing; it is not. Like food and shelter, social needs are essential for life.
Books are the only place where I can see this falling apart slightly, as many do read as a form of leisure and nothing else. However, we can also see book sales hit their peak on things like BookTok, where there is a sense of community or exclusivity. As well as why we see more men reading non-fiction as a proxy to improve their social standing through information.
If there are easier routes to achieve these social benefits, it would be taken. Shrinking the market from what it could be.
Theory 2:
The revenue funnels are collapsing.
Matt Braly, the creator of Amphibia and one of the head writers on Gravity Falls, had this series of tweets on X a while back. This, along with the treatment of the Avatar franchise over the years, was what triggered my thinking on this topic. Avatar as in Avatar: The Last Airbender, not the blue people.
Similar to our discussion in Theory 1, art is not lucrative on its own. They are profitable as a proxy for another. Like selling ads.
Animation especially has always been targeted at kids or younger folks who would be prime candidates to advertise toys to. On top of toys from other franchises, the most profitable media businesses generate income from merch of their own. Think Pokemon or Star Wars. The merch sales dwarf all its other revenue streams. By continually pumping out TV shows, games, and movies, the art itself becomes the advertisement, while the actual ad spots can be bid out to other vendors.
However, this doesn’t work when everything goes into streaming. There are no ads, people share passwords, and there is piracy. For the consumer, watching the piece of media, buying the merch, and being in the community is the benefit, so if there is a way to get the media at a lower cost, that’ll be the preferred approach. That is why streaming platforms are making it harder to share passwords, putting ads in place, etc.
These actions also form a level of exclusivity, which is the same benefit that movies have by running in the cinemas. The exclusivity of being first, going with friends and/or not being spoiled online and feeling left out. I am using movies as an example to build on Matt Braly’s tweets. Everyone has a form of media, art, or information that they do this with.
Even so, the long-term profitability of a movie has also been hampered by the lowered sales of Blu-rays and TV reruns with ads. There is also the question of the rising costs of making art, which we will touch on in the next theory
Theory 3:
It costs a lot to make good art.
Cost includes time as much as it does money, and they’ve both been growing exponentially.
The Godfather had a cost of $6 to $ 7 million, with a production cycle of 361 days. That is the price of a single actor’s salary these days. Alright, let’s look at something with more post-production required.
The first Jurassic Park cost $ 63 million and took 291 days to complete, while the latest film in the franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, had a budget of $ 180 million to $ 254 million and a production time of 359 days. If you want to be pedantic and account for inflation, it would be about $141 mil.
The argument here is not that higher production cost bad, but rather higher production cost requires higher return on investment. And with the longer production times, it forces the companies that greenlight these movies to take the safest bet or the bets that can further their IP for longer-lasting returns.
This issue is exacerbated with TV and animation, where the time between seasons is taking longer, the production costs are getting higher, but the profits are not keeping up.
We hear a lot about crunch, especially in game development or compositing or animation. Being forced to release something that isn’t fully done because the money has to start coming in. It does feel bad. It feels like the artist should be given the time they need to make something great. With the catch that not everything you make will be great, and you won’t know until you release it.
The online discourse about studios not taking risks anymore is true, and to a certain degree, understandable. How are you to take these risks when each production costs that much? They are already paying their employees rates that are low enough to keep them in the black. The world just got more expensive, so production naturally increases in monetary costs. It requires more people, which then requires more coordination, which then requires more time. When every release needs to be the next Avengers Endgame, then the bar for overpromising gets too high, and the expectations get even higher.
It is unfair to just say “reduce cost” as a blanket statement, though I think production time is becoming too overblown. 2 years for a single season of 8 episodes is too little. It seems like the industry is in a choke where they need to keep up with costs, make sure everything makes 10x the return so that they can repay their shareholders, generate long-lasting IPs, continue to grow existing IPs, and maintain their reputation so schlubs on YouTube stop shouting that “this studio is over!” every time another studio releases something. That’s not a good look to the shareholders and investors.
Similar to the parallels with information above, this somewhat parallels startups. Needing to do everything and anything to keep the faith with their investors.
Theory 4:
It costs too little to obtain any art.
Another possible reason for the heightened costs above is due to audience expectations. YouTube videos now look like TV shows, and TV shows now look like movies. Games look like movies, and animation needs to be a rave of compositing for it to even be considered good.
While theory 3 posits that the cost of making good art is higher, the fact is the cost of making and distributing art in general has never been lower.
This is not a new phenomenon. It’s been around since home computers were a thing. Every year, the cost to produce and distribute gets lower. Every child wants to be a YouTuber now, like how every child wanted to be a rock star in the 90s. Adults, children, everyone in between are making content and consuming content made by other people.
YouTube reported its largest cohort of watch hours on TV. This increases the expectations for the older forms of media to adapt or fall into the stable revenue pits of radio and books. YouTube runs mainly on ads. They’ve upped their ad count per video and per session. There are now more unskippable 15-30-second ads, on top of the YouTubers’ sponsored segments. This goes back to theory 2, where the revenue of art comes from its proxy value rather than the art itself.
When the cost of obtaining these media is so low, and so addicting, people gravitate towards it. What’s three ads, four times in a 10min video, when it is free like cable TV?
Tying yet again to theory 1, as long as most of your community watches similar things, you buy similar things, and the cost of jumping to the next trend is basically none, your social needs can be met. (Yes, I am aware that it is not fully met, but that is a whole different topic). Break out of your algorithm for a day; it is overwhelming to see where people are at. It’s not that kids stopped asking parents to buy things; they are just buying different things now cause their favourite streamer is using it. Adults are buying toys now cause they keep watching things from their childhood at minimal cost.
When all your time and disposable income have been used up on other forms of media, everything else that takes more time and costs more instantly becomes less enticing.
It does mean that good things at lower costs are harder to find. They still exist; there are a lot of good things now. However, being drowned out in the large sea of content is doing them no favours in terms of discovery and return on investment.
Understand that there would be some arguments about how you will always support the arts or that corporations should distribute their revenue better. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of commerce.
I met an incredible artist, selling their art book for $600. $600?! That is insane. The art in there is amazing, but not everyone has that amount of disposable income. If you do, great. More power to you.
The fact is that not all artists understand the market, while the consumers misunderstand who the businesses are serving.
I would love to hear of exceptions! That would be amazing! ok, I know this sounds sarcastic over text, but genuinely, I would like to hear of exceptions so I have more cool things to immerse myself in
Also, if there is anyone in the industry, please correct me. I don’t know a way out of this, and am not sure if there is or needs to be.