{"id":2650,"date":"2023-07-23T23:47:09","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T06:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/?p=2650"},"modified":"2023-07-24T07:41:35","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T14:41:35","slug":"inflection-point-a-crisis-in-paying-for-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2023\/07\/inflection-point-a-crisis-in-paying-for-culture.html","title":{"rendered":"Inflection Point? A Crisis in Paying for Culture in the Age of Abundance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2651\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?resize=300%2C169&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?resize=768%2C432&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?w=1280&amp;ssl=1 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>We\u2019re consuming more culture than ever:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Last week it was reported that music platforms <a href=\"https:\/\/www.yahoo.com\/entertainment\/global-music-streams-30-8-133030641.html\">streamed 1 trillion songs<\/a> in the first six months of 2023.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The most-viewed YouTube video is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/music\/2020\/nov\/02\/baby-shark-becomes-most-viewed-youtube-video-ever-beating-despacito\">Pinkfong\u2019s Baby Shark Dance<\/a>, which has been seen 13 billion times.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In 2018, a record <a href=\"https:\/\/www.statista.com\/statistics\/187122\/movie-releases-in-north-america-since-2001\/#:~:text=Movie%20releases%20in%20the%20U.S.%20%26%20Canada%202000%2D2022&amp;text=In%202022%2C%20a%20total%20of,before%20the%20COVID%2D19%20outbreak.\">873 movies were released<\/a> in the US and Canada, a year in which Netflix alone spent $13 billion on content.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Last year between 500,000 and 1 million books were commercially published (depending on how you count), four million more if you add self-published.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>According to some reports, <a href=\"https:\/\/metalinjection.net\/its-just-business\/theres-way-too-much-music-uploaded-to-spotify-every-day#:~:text=According%20to%20Universal%20Music%20Group,to%20Spotify%20every%20single%20day.\">100,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day<\/a>, where there are currently 100 million songs already available.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The New York Times reports <a href=\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/website\/nytimes.com\/#ranking\">580 million monthly visitors<\/a> online. If that sounds like a lot, Yahoo counts <a href=\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/website\/yahoo.com\/#overview\">3.3 billion per month.<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The audience has never been bigger, and its appetite in the mass-distraction marketplace seems insatiable. But what does 13 billion YouTube views mean? Justin Bieber has 111 million Twitter followers. Is he really that smart? Or entertaining? Or even have much to say? [How algorithms magnify these numbers is a topic for another day]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Despite the demand, over the past few months the production side of all this \u201ccontent\u201d seems to have been unraveling. Writers and actors in Hollywood are on what looks to be a protracted strike. Streaming companies are pulling back, laying off and consolidating. TV networks and cable companies are hemorrhaging customers. Twitter is melting down. Reddit is on strike. <em>BuzzFeed News<\/em> closed and <em>National Geographic<\/em> laid off all its writers. Onetime sports powerhouse ESPN is in crisis. NPR has made significant staff cuts. Spotify cut 200 employees. The publishing industry is shedding workers and some of its brightest stars. Musicians are in revolt over the lack of money they get from streamers. The podcast boom seems to be wilting. And theatre companies across the US are in crisis, many closing down or quitting some of their most-beloved programs. Look next for ballet companies, opera companies and symphony orchestras to declare distress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With seemingly insatiable demand for content, why now the crisis? Compensation has been separated from demand. Sell widgets at X price with a profit of Y and the more widgets you sell the richer you become. That&#8217;s how it used to work with culture. Sell tickets, sell albums, sell paintings, people give you more money. But in the age of abundance, an audience of a million streams doesn&#8217;t necessarily translate into financial success. A billion streams doesn&#8217;t make you a superstar. We seem to be at an inflection point for creative industries. It\u2019s the convergence of a number of trends:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\" type=\"1\">\n<li>Anything ad-supported (journalism, TV, websites) has seen its revenue collapse as millions of ads became billions of ads and ad rates dropped precipitously. Big Tech companies were allowed to swallow up both the marketplace for ads as well as the supply, controlling the market at massive scale making it impossible for others to compete. Content makers have virtually no power in this scenario.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Investors dazzled by the scale at which Big Tech could deliver audience, poured tens of billions into companies that promised massive numbers of consumers (even if they didn\u2019t have them yet). Anyone operating in more traditional models unable to compete with tech scale is considered a loser and non-viable. Not worth investing in. When entertainment giant Disney is considered too small to compete, you know there\u2019s a problem.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Selling abundance versus the intentional purchase. Streaming companies are successful because they offer access to everything (as they define it). Purchase a single album for $19.95 versus get access to all recorded music (probably including the album in which you\u2019re interested) for $9.95 per month and it\u2019s kind of a no-brainer. But \u201caccess\u201d is a different relationship with an artist than choosing to own a copy of their work. And artist share of the abundance transaction is woefully insufficient because abundance effectively neutralizes any one artist\u2019s power to negotiate for more. Additionally, the evolution in consumer behavior to outsourcing algorithmic selection of their music offered by streaming has changed the way people find and listen to music. [Again a topic for another time]<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>We often talk about non-profit arts as if they\u2019re a separate discreet universe. They\u2019re not. As <a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\">Andrew Taylor<\/a> likes to point out \u2013 there\u2019s only one business model \u2013 the one that supports what you\u2019re trying to do. If you\u2019re a theatre company right now, costs are likely up ~30 percent and ticket sales are down ~30 percent. Other non-profit art forms report versions of these numbers. Non-profit arts are caught in the same dynamics as for-profit culture, just on a smaller scale (millions of dollars instead of billions). The audience no longer makes distinctions between high and low or commercial versus non-profit. So non-profit is facing the same scale and abundance issues commercial culture is, but with more limited tools. Plus, the non-profit model has been slow to evolve whereas commercial culture is more nimble at reinventing the basics of their business model.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The rise of the creative class. (No, not Richard Florida\u2019s CC) People define themselves by the culture they choose to share. And they\u2019re sharing more than ever. This has changed their relationships to culture. And their expectations. In a world of hyper-abundance and the ability of the audience to define themselves creatively, what they choose is either aspirational or oppositional. That is, they value culture as a reactive vehicle which they can use as an opportunity to make a statement \u2013 of solidarity, of membership in a tribe, or as an idea or tribe worth fighting against. The sharing algorithms amplify messages that outrage or soothe, bypassing the ordinary or thoughtful. This has narrowed the aesthetic range of culture most people encounter or engage with. So if your work exists outside the established algorithms, you\u2019re having a more difficult time being found.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>Add to this the introduction of generative AI-created content and the problems of artist compensation are about to get exponentially more challenging. Last week an AI company announced its AI had created 100 million new songs (essentially doubling Spotify\u2019s catalogue). Spotify now does battle daily with the AI-driven AI-created bots uploading \u201csongs\u201d to its platform. Amazon likewise is challenged to police the hundreds of thousands of AI-generated \u201cbooks\u201d being thrown up on its marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Are any of these any good? Doesn\u2019t really matter \u2013 the sheer volume influences the algorithms, making it more difficult for artists to be noticed and chosen. There will be mitigations, just as we have found ways to defend against spambots. But the glut of content is only going to grow, continuing to put pressure on artists to be compensated for their work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our consumption of culture has never been higher. So why are culture producers melting down?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35,16,20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-business","8":"category-arts-funding","9":"category-changing-culture","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ePZm-GK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":47,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2007\/11\/the_rise_of_arts_culture.html","url_meta":{"origin":2650,"position":0},"title":"The Rise Of Arts Culture","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"November 21, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Today I want to make an argument about the rise of arts culture. In the 1950s, at the dawn of TV, the medium's pioneers believed that television would be the great democratizer - exposing culture to the masses. The best of the world's culture could be brought into the living\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;main&quot;","block_context":{"text":"main","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/main"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":118,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2009\/06\/bill_ivey_talks_about_obama_an.html","url_meta":{"origin":2650,"position":1},"title":"Bill Ivey Talks About Obama and the Arts and Whether America Should Have a Secretary of Culture","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"June 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Bill Ivey was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Clinton administration. More recently he has been director of the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University, and, after last year's presidential election, ran the Obama administration's transition team for culture. So what place will the arts have in\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2009\/06\/bill_ivey_talks_about_obama_an.html#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":560,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2015\/01\/culture-crashing-is-the-internet-killing-our-creative-class.html","url_meta":{"origin":2650,"position":2},"title":"Culture-crashing &#8211; Is The Internet Killing Our Creative Class?","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"January 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Scott Timberg, an arts journalist and author of the CultureCrash blog on ArtsJournal, has a new book out called... Culture Crash. It's Scott's attempt to look at how the digital revolution has impacted artists. The tagline of the book - \"The Killing of the Creative Class\" - gives you an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;arts &amp; tech&quot;","block_context":{"text":"arts &amp; tech","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/arts-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"jpeg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/jpeg-180x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3149,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2025\/12\/from-30000-feet-five-year-end-observations-about-arts-and-culture-in-2025.html","url_meta":{"origin":2650,"position":3},"title":"Five Year-end Observations about Arts and Culture in 2025","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"December 31, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises\u2014the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in D.C., the endless op-eds about the \"death of cinema\"\u2014stop looking like isolated incidents. They resolve into a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;changing culture&quot;","block_context":{"text":"changing culture","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/changing-culture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/mountains-6496638_1920-1.jpg?fit=500%2C750&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1107,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2016\/09\/this-weeks-aj-arts-highlights-has-entertainment-made-art-irrelevant.html","url_meta":{"origin":2650,"position":4},"title":"This Week&#8217;s AJ Arts Highlights: Has Entertainment Made Art Irrelevant?","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"September 11, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This Week: Major shakeup in London's museum world... Nobel laureate says entertainment has killed art... Latest study of Hollywood reaffirms cultural inequality... Why did Wells Fargo disparage artists?... Did the Glenn Gould Foundation get ahead of itself in announcing arts Nobel prizes? 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Since television (and before it, radio) brought the immediacy of produced culture into our living rooms, we've treated the power of a massive aggregated audience with awe. That something is popular enough to attain common currency means it has power. Mass culture\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;main&quot;","block_context":{"text":"main","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/main"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2650"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2662,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2650\/revisions\/2662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}