Now lets talk about why most artists are starving.
These creatives are in the entertainment niche.
Which is very different from the problem solving niche.
1. Entertainment is not a necessity, it is a luxury
2. Entertainment is a low-cost luxury[1]
3. This is a lot of competition in this niche. Remember how I said there are two types of products: Problem solving and Entertainment? Well the problem solving products only compete with other products that solve the same problem. In the entertainment niche, you are competing with every single other entertainment product. Your dopey little fantasy novel is competing with Call of Duty, 50 Cent, Angry Birds, Reddit, Flappy Bird, Facebook, Hacker News, and sex.
* 4. Given points 1 and 2, that means to make money, you HAVE to scale and be popular to many people[1]. Considering point 3, you have to have great content at the very least.
So I hope you can see why most content authors are starving is due to economics and their value creating ability, and not torrenting or spreading of knowledge.
I'm sure you know that the entertainment industry is a feast or famine one. The people on the top make all the money, and the people on the bottom make very little, simply because the barrier to entry for peoples attention is very high and only the best will get it (point 3).
If you're going to sell music, don't quit your day job unless you're sure you're going to be on the "feast" side of the equation.
*[1] Not necessarily. There is a growing model where you give content for free / low cost, then sell high priced ($1000+) goods to your rich, loyal fans (e.g. exclusive signed CDs, etc.).
Giving stuff away can be a fabulous way to garner publicity, and people have every right to do it. I'm just saying that if everything is free and always free, art becomes nothing more than a hobby.
The trouble with that is that great art takes a lot of time to produce. If it involves more than one person, which means pretty much any film and most recorded music, then it also costs money or many peoples' time. So if people cannot make a living off it, then they cannot dedicate that time. You will not have any great art.
One irony of all this is that pirates often talk about how they're sticking up for the little guy and sticking it to the big multi-millionaire artists. But that's not how it works. The little guy -- the indy band, the small film studio -- is part of the long tail. When you subtract across the board, the long tail gets hit harder as a percentage of its total income than the big guys.
Edit: realized that the reason the MPAA are the most insane about this is probably because major movies are really big-ticket investments. The risk is a lot larger, and to more people.
To add even more irony, books are among the least pirated things and Kindle is one of the most successful for-pay art markets on the 'net. Yet books cost less to produce than recorded music and much less than movies. Go figure. Even weirder, Kindle uses DRM and yet nobody seems to care.
> To add even more irony, books are among the least pirated things and Kindle is one of the most successful for-pay art markets on the 'net. Yet books cost less to produce than recorded music and much less than movies. Go figure. Even weirder, Kindle uses DRM and yet nobody seems to care.
That is interesting. I would've figured after Movies and Music, Books would be the most pirated things. Sources please? I would like to know more about this.
How much money you have is proportional to:
* How much value you create
* Your ability / willingness to monetize it
Now lets talk about why most artists are starving. These creatives are in the entertainment niche. Which is very different from the problem solving niche.
1. Entertainment is not a necessity, it is a luxury
2. Entertainment is a low-cost luxury[1]
3. This is a lot of competition in this niche. Remember how I said there are two types of products: Problem solving and Entertainment? Well the problem solving products only compete with other products that solve the same problem. In the entertainment niche, you are competing with every single other entertainment product. Your dopey little fantasy novel is competing with Call of Duty, 50 Cent, Angry Birds, Reddit, Flappy Bird, Facebook, Hacker News, and sex.
* 4. Given points 1 and 2, that means to make money, you HAVE to scale and be popular to many people[1]. Considering point 3, you have to have great content at the very least.
So I hope you can see why most content authors are starving is due to economics and their value creating ability, and not torrenting or spreading of knowledge.
I'm sure you know that the entertainment industry is a feast or famine one. The people on the top make all the money, and the people on the bottom make very little, simply because the barrier to entry for peoples attention is very high and only the best will get it (point 3).
If you're going to sell music, don't quit your day job unless you're sure you're going to be on the "feast" side of the equation.
*[1] Not necessarily. There is a growing model where you give content for free / low cost, then sell high priced ($1000+) goods to your rich, loyal fans (e.g. exclusive signed CDs, etc.).