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Steve Weinstein's avatar

My first Ted Gioia column, and I hope it's an outlier. Rather than deconstruct this wisp of an argument for a future where a thousand flowers bloom, let me focus on this quotation:

"And this doesn’t include the hundreds of startups that are trying to revitalize our culture. Every week I hear from some entrepreneur who wants to help musicians (or other creatives) make more money and have more opportunities. [...] Not all of these startups will succeed. In fact, most will fail. But a few will thrive. And, based on my dealings with them, they are going to be on the side of the individual artist, not the huge corporation or institution."

This was Daniel Ek's pitch for Spotify. The market for recordings was vanishing due to piracy, and Spotify was going to use streaming to put money back in the pockets of the working musician. How's that working out for the average musician? About as well as it's working out for most of the people helming those 3 million podcasts.

If TG can monetize his Substack, more power to him. Maybe it will be a better financial model than Spotify. Or Medium. Or HuffPost before that. But there are only so many $50 subscriptions a person can afford. Without subscriptions, the only source of income is advertising, and the advertising money is not going to go to the content creators, if history is any guide.

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Michael Harrington's avatar

The state of culture Ted describes is actually abysmal because we can't value culture by the amount of content created but by if and how it is consumed and shared. The problem, as Ted states, is obvious: there is an explosion of supply but not demand, which is limited by physical constraints such as time and attention. Technology has blessed us with the explosion of supply with new tools for creating and sharing, but it has also created an impossible task for valuing consumption. Consumption of art is free today, which means the production of art is also done for free. Of course, winner-take-all has created a bonanza of ancillary wealth for the few who command the attention of the global masses. But this only means we get creative content from the same small pool of artists, which starves the ecosystem of innovative creativity. (Who is Colleen Hoover and is she writing the same romance novel again and again?)

So, how to rebalance supply and demand to reinvigorate cultural innovation? Certainly not by looking at mass audience models that can only feed winner-take-all dynamics. My answer is that we need to look to the creative process that defines us as humans. Culture does not create humanity; humanity creates culture and our humanity is embodied in what we create and share, not in what we consume. Since we are all part of this global humanity, the answer is in the creative and sharing process, not just attention-consuming consumption. In other words, when we create and share our own humanity, we become more attentive and appreciative of others' creations. I am a photographer, thus I seek out other photographers' works.

The industrial and post-industrial economy created a bifurcation between creators and audiences where fewer and fewer creators command more and more attention from audiences. One is either a creator or a consumer, but we are all both. Rebalancing this means more niche market networks for varied content and better human connections within those networks. The dearth of demand is solved by the creative social network, not the network platforms or the distributors. All we need is a creative network that serves creators and those who wish to share their creations and leaves the technology and distribution platforms to the sole task of discovery, connection, and coordination. My friends recommend new art to me, not Amazon, Apple or Spotify.

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