It's almost as if.. Doing stuff that you'd otherwise do in your spare-time, is not a real job for 99% of people ?
Yeah, I love playing and making games, nobody wants to play them, and nobody wants to watch me do it, because I'm not good enough at it. That's why I have a day job.
There's also a limited need for entertainers/creatives (they are needed, but not comparatively very many).. One person can entertain millions.
There are about 8,000 one-in-a-million people out there for any discipline anyone cares to name. Around 800 of them speak English to some degree and are connected to the internet.
There is room on a top-10 list for 10 of them. Number 9 will do OK but is starting to move down the Praeto curve. The competition to entertain others on the internet is fierce; it is difficult for me to see how even someone of that level of talent and calibre could survive except for the fact that most of their competition simply gives up before they start because it looks like a lousy career.
There's an even more limited need for fraud-promoting bankers, crooked and corrupt politicians, people who spend their entire lives gambling on the markets, and organised criminals, but somehow we never seem to lack for all of those.
This isn't some kind of rational market forces issue. Artists and intellectuals have real power. But starving them of cash, branding them "entertainers", and converting their jobs into a gig economy scramble guarantees they'll be too distracted to realise it.
> But starving them of cash, branding them "entertainers", and converting their jobs into a gig economy scramble guarantees they'll be too distracted to realise it.
I'm no fan of the 'gig economy' - but haven't most musicians and writers and singers and sportspeople been getting a shitty deal since time immemorial?
Just in the 1980s that meant putting years of unpaid practice into your craft then not being able to get a book deal / signed with a record label / a gallery to sell your paintings / a try out with the big team.
I feel bad for someone who's struggling to make a living playing guitar on Twitch - but the fact it's hard to make money playing guitar isn't Twitch's fault.
I don’t know if there’s data to back this, but I suspect that musicians might have gotten a better deal before recording technology, since music performances would have to be hyper local, so there would be multiple markets for music instead of the one (almost global) market that exists today.
But how much do you personally pay for the artists' products per month, compared to how much you pay your bank? How many people actually pay anything for some specific artists' stuff, compared to some specific bank?
Everybody needs a bank, and there are very few banks, with very few people who really earn a lot. Gambling is gambling.. most lose there. And the rest mentioned are a result of governents/police/court system not working.
It's easy to say Bobby the youtuber deserves more money... actually paying him from your pocket is a totally different thing.
> But how much do you personally pay for the artists' products per month
All in all, entertainment budget is a good amount actually.
For the sake of the argument, it’s easier to set the time frame 30 years back, and talk about CDs and books we were buying. Record companies made decent money, publishers as well. People massively payed for physical distribution, there was only crappy workarounds.
But most of that money didn’t go to artists, most of them were still working side jobs, while middlemen thrived. How different is it now ? I actually think it’s slightly better these days, but the biggest slice of the pie still go to middlemen who protect their position to keep the markets captive.
I do think it's a market forces issue. But it's an issue where forces don't align with societal value (which I think is an extremely common problem in the modern economy). Back when musicians/publishers had real leverage over who could access their music/content by means of their control over the media holding these, it was in some ways easier for them to make money. It's the gatekeepers that manage to extract rents from the system, and it's hard for any single artist/intellectual to do anything about that, and if multiple try to do something about it together there's always going to be an incentive to defect or not join that effort in the first place.
Conversations are futile if we’re not working with the same definitions and context.
You wrote:
> Or as if monopolizing a distribution channel allows you to charge rents way in excess of your costs.
Defining “distribution channel” as a single company’s website rather than the internet would make “distribution channel” meaningless in the context of this discussion.
It’s trivial to distribute a video with anyone all over the world in this day and age. It’s not trivial to make money from it.
Google might have a monopoly on the mechanism that can be used to make money from videos, but that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video.
If you're distributing ad supported video content where else do you go?
Vimeo is the second biggest video sharing platform. They have 200 million eyeballs they can push to your content as opposed to 2.3 billion and no ad network.
I don't think it's an enormous stretch to say that youtube own this market.
>that’s a different discussion than having a monopoly on distributing video.
I can entertain the idea that YouTube currently has a monopoly (or “owns the market”) on the service of connecting advertisers to small time content creators.
Whether or not it harms society is something I have not concluded. I am aware there are negatives for medium size content creators who lack negotiating power, but also huge upsides to individual content creators who almost always cause YouTube to lose money. And I’m not sure what any alternative is, other than a taxpayer funded version of a YouTube, but that also opens a can of worms.
> I neither stated nor implied that they did.
Sorry, I interpreted “monopolizing a distribution channel” in the context of YouTube compensating content creators to mean YouTube monopolizing distribution of videos by content creators.
>huge upsides to individual content creators who almost always cause YouTube to lose money.
Not seeing the upside nor the evidence of YouTube losing significant amounts of money.
>And I’m not sure what any alternative is
Applying antitrust laws.
We can thank the explosion of Internet startups and innovation to their judicious application to Microsoft in the late 90s (it tied their hands significantly).
Individual content creators get access to the entire world without worrying about any technical issues, and getting access to advertisers (however small it may be).
>the evidence of YouTube losing significant amounts of money.
I don't know the specifics, but I do know that hosting video is in the wheelhouse of many well endowed companies like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. They all (presumably) have the capability to build a Youtube competitor over the last 15 years, but the fact that they have not indicates that it is not worth it.
Which leads me to think that this business model of Youtube's where anyone can upload anything they want at any time regardless of how garbage it is and it has to be able to be served to the whole world relatively immediately, is only viable with an enormous ad company (Google) backing it.
But as a stand alone service, it would never be a viable business. The proof is that a non Youtube has never existed before and it still doesn't exist. Nobody is stopping someone from putting up data centers everywhere and offering this service that Youtube does, and not even the companies that can afford it are bothering to touch it.
The Microsoft internet browser situation is not comparable, in my opinion.
> It's almost as if.. Doing stuff that you'd otherwise do in your spare-time, is not a real job for 99% of people ?
Realistically, people run channels this is about would not do it in spare-time. Making gameplay video that people actually want to watch is not nearly same as playing game for fun. You have to be entertaining for others. It is same difference as between being comedian for money versus being funny with friends.
There's comparatively little need for games to be played, even if NOBODY IN THE WORLD played games for a living, the games would still be played, in the exact way that coal wouldn't be mined.
It's a bit the same with other creative work, like music and art, there is a demand for it, but the amount of commercial demand is next to nothing compared to the amound of creative work being done regardless of pay.
The number of guitars being played would be more or less the same even if nobody made money playing them.
The number of paintings being painted would be more or less the same even if nobody ever sold one.
There is some quality to be gained from going professional and devoting your entire time to do something, and part of that is probably a contributing factor why people can earn a living doing it.
> The number of guitars being played would be more or less the same even if nobody made money playing them.
This is not true. The number of people who play music or instruments depends on economy of music. When you could live from it, people did it more often and longer.
> The number of paintings being painted would be more or less the same even if nobody ever sold one.
Yeah, I love playing and making games, nobody wants to play them, and nobody wants to watch me do it, because I'm not good enough at it. That's why I have a day job.
There's also a limited need for entertainers/creatives (they are needed, but not comparatively very many).. One person can entertain millions.