[munificent]

> Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit like indie game makers nowadays.

See also: musicians (recording, less so live performance), DJs, photographers, journalists, documentarians, etc.

Essentially any creative pursuit where:

1) Making it carries high prestige and gratification.

2) The product can be reproduced digitally and appreciated by a large audience.

3) Technology to produce it has become cheaper.

The basic market forces are sucking all the money out of it. I think it's good for a society for skilled creative people to be able to spend most of their time on their art instead of having to do it as a side gig. But we don't seem to have an economic system that currently supports it aside from a small number of lucky winners of the zeitgeist lottery.

[corrral]

Graeber asserts in Bullshit Jobs that when this happens—lots of people wanting these kind of creative high-prestige, high-gratification jobs—the upper echelons of the career tend to be captured by, bluntly, trust fund kids, because they're the only ones for whom a career path that involves potentially years or even decades of barely being paid is viable. Ditto editorships at prestigious publications, non-profit work, all that kind of thing.

[majormajor]

Seems like there's certainly a split there. Lots of popular musicians, for instance, from very humble economic backgrounds. Athletes as well - trust fund kids don't seem, as a rule, to be single-mindedly enough focused on sports throughout their entire childhood and adolescence to hit the top tiers.

Maybe the common link between those two, and unlike some other fields, is that the work has to be put in in childhood and adolescense, when "being paid" isn't much of a thing anyway for anyone.

[munificent]

> Lots of popular musicians, for instance, from very humble economic backgrounds.

Lots of musicians from humble backgrounds, but not as many popular ones today as there used to be. A lot of musicians that get big these days often have a narrative around them of coming from limited means (and some actually do) but if you dig, you often find that most had some family connection or something that massively increased the odds of their winning the popularity lottery.

> Athletes as well

Athletes don't quite apply to my model. You might think it's because their primary job is not producing digital media but winning games, but that's not true. Money flows into professional sports in large through people watching games. Sponsorships are very important too, but those trail the athlete's popularity. The athlete is essentially selling some of the popularity they have already garned through media of their games.

I think the main reason there is always a market for young skilled athletes (in sports that are popular to watch) is simply because there is almost no market for watching old games. Unlike novels, music, etc., virtually no one watches older games. So where in other forms of media, you are competing against a constantly growing corpus of existing content, in sports, the content evaporates quite quickly and needs constant refreshing.

(This might suggest that the path to success in other forms of media is by deliberately creating extremely timely content. "Here's a new song about things that happened on July 12, 2022!")

[whiddershins]

He probably has a point, but Graeber also ends up being pretty full of it in most cases.

[foota]

Unfortunately, I think this is somewhat unavoidable, there's only so much time people can spend consuming entertainment, and so the market for it is somewhat fixed. Meanwhile, there are many people willing to produce it.

I don't know if it's possible for writing/entertainment/etc., to be sustainable for a large portion of the population without major economic reform.

[munificent]

> there's only so much time people can spend consuming entertainment, and so the market for it is somewhat fixed.

It's even worse than that, actually. Because existing entertainment can still be consumed long after its produced, and even consumed more than once by the same person. When you write a book today, you aren't just competing with other new novels, you're competing with every novel written all the way back to Robinson Crusoe.

[foota]

True, but there's sufficient distinction between contemporary and classical works that I think the effect may be limited.

[karatinversion]

On the other hand, Spotify’s most streamed song has been Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of you” since October 2017.

[_glass]

I grew up with this assertion. But right now through my spouse and a lot of friends, I see, that you can earn good money by specializing in a not that popular instrument, e.g. piano (!). And then be just advanced+reliable+do the effort of networking. The money is comparable to a software job.