I read two articles this week that reinforced the idea that art is no longer something most people can use to make a living. Not a new, thought, of course, and hardly original to myself. But teasing the implications out is worth the time, I think, as repetition helps remind people.
The first was a review of the book Band People. I have not read the book, so my impressions are entirely tied to the information in the review. And the review is primarily about how rock-and-roll musicians do and do not make a living. The answer is largely that they do not. Spotify, for instance, reported record profits in the last quarter. Part of those record profits might come from the fact that they are allowed to exploit musicians. Artists ear fractions of a penny per stream and Spotify has arbitrarily decided that only songs that stream one thousand times a year get a payout. Approximately two-thirds of artists will receive nothing from Spotify under those terms. It’s good, apparently, to be the rentier.
The second was the musings of Summer Brennan about her own literary journey. Brennan discusses how little she made from her well selling books. even the bestselling, the Oyster Wars that has earned out the advance, only earn her limited, not enough to live off, royalties. She points out that almost no authors make enough to consistently live on, and that looking for financial rewards in books is not likely to lead to happy life. She compares getting a book published to going to grad school: hard and expensive, even if it is worth the effort.
This kind of financial reality is sobering, not just for my own personal ambitions, but for the concept of art in general. If people cannot make a living from their art, then we get less art overall and less art from people in less than stellar financial situations. I largely stopped writing for several years due to financial situations. I needed to work several jobs to be able to pay for school and, you know, eat, and that left no time for writing. Even assuming I could write well enough to be consistently published (note the Failed before the Writer’s Journey in the headline for some sense of how likely that was), as noted, the money simply isn’t enough to live on.
The math is similar for all other kinds of arts. Some artists can get other kinds of jobs, teaching for example, or graphic designer, that are adjacent to their art. But that still means they have less time to spend on creating art. And, of course, you have to hit a certain level of success before you can get the kinds of jobs that are adjacent to and provide explicit time to practice said art. All of this, obviously, limits the voices we hear.
Working class people, and since minorities in this country tend to be on the lower end of the income spectrum that will disproportionately mean non-white people, will have fewer and fewer opportunities to create art. We will get fewer voices from that perspective and will be poorer as a culture for it. If we want art, then we need to create an economic society that takes care of people and rewards the ones who do the work. Otherwise, we will find our artistic word largely created by the heirs of Richie Rich and Scrooge McDuck.
And no one wants the Huey Dewy Louie rap about swimming in gold.
Weekly Word Count
400-ish. Mostly focused on revising the short story I intend to send out and re-plotting the POI meets Leverage novel. Not the best week, but hey, words on paper. Er, computer screens. Words on electrons?