[confounded]

> It still costs money to produce something of value

It costs rapidly decreasing amounts to produce something of value.

If you want a few stabs from a violin in your song, you rarely need to hire a concert violinist these days, thanks to recordings and software-synthesizers based on infinitely reproducible code and data.

[TimJYoung]

Absolutely, but that doesn't mean that it's still easy to produce the final work. If anyone can do it, then it's obviously not valuable.

Take "Stranger Things" on Netflix, for example. I normally hate sci-fi, but this was one heck of a great season 1 for a series. Did it take a lot less in terms of technical know-how/costs to produce than it would have taken in the 80's ? Sure, no doubt. But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value. The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".

[confounded]

> But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value

Human cultural value != market-value. This is what I'm getting at.

What was the incremental cost to you to watch each episode?

How much did you pay to watch ET? Buy a Twin Peaks box-set?

> The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".

You can find free life-experiences (Medium, Twitter), knowledge and expertise (Github, Wikipedia, Quora) all over the internet.

I'm not saying that people don't need money to exist, or that as we're able to produce more, cultural exhanges are worth subjectively less to other humans (quite the opposite).

I'm saying that the costs of people producing things is decreasing rapidly. What is increasing is the net share of value which is captured by distribution platforms.

It's relevant that you can only watch Stranger Things on Netflix --- you can't 'buy it', you need to pay a rent in perpetuity to watch your favorite shows at your own discretion. This is only possible due to the power which the distribution platform (Netflix) has accumulated.

[TimJYoung]

Good conversation, thank you.

Of course, there is good, free content everywhere, but it is normally in the form of endeavors that don't take a lot of time or are hobbies. As soon as something starts to take more than X amount of hours per week, it has to either start bringing in revenue or it has to stop growing. In other words, there is no limit to the breadth of the content that can be available for free, but there are hard financial limits to the depth of the content that can be available for free.

Re: Netflix: I think Netflix is a good example of a distribution platform that is in a more symbiotic relationship with its content creators. The content creators get the eyeballs for their work and, more importantly, get paid, while Netflix takes their cut. However, this is also changing as Netflix becomes both content creator and distribution platform. As to being able to purchase Netflix content elsewhere, I think it all comes down to the extra revenue vs. possible loss of subscription revenue. For now I think the equation is tilted towards the latter, hence you won't see that content elsewhere. My understanding is that other content creators are getting more than a little nervous about the Netflix-branded content, so they might start playing hardball.