[easytiger]

> Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content.

Another viable option is letting a lot of the content die. I'm sure we can all live without knowing that one neat trick that you won't believe.

In your proposal:

> ... constant challenge for any creative type is making a living.

Well perhaps if that's the case what you do is not valuable to anyone. Over time economic cycles destroy things that were once valuable. There used to be whole industries selling ice from icebergs in London. I bet they were rather upset when domestic refrigeration became popular.

Music as a physical medium is no longer very valuable due to a nexus of the proliferation of arbitrarily reproducible data systems and a decrease in the perception of value of non live performance music.

The suggestions of a broadband tax etc are insane and the work of lobbyists and other socially destructive parasites.

[skylan_q]

... constant challenge for any creative type is making a living.

Well perhaps if that's the case what you do is not valuable to anyone.

People have trouble coming to terms with the fact that they don't necessarily deserve to earn a living because they're doing something they like. It's like people are incapable of growing up anymore.

[karmacondon]

Something tells me that you benefit daily from the efforts of people who had difficulty earning a living from their craft at some point. Do you listen to music, watch television or movies, appreciate art, read books or web content? The creators of those things didn't all start out as highly acclaimed millionaires. Most of them spent years making things that weren't valuable to anyone.

There are an abundance of people who are capable of earning a living through a variety of work. There are very few people who are capable of consistently providing you with a few hours of diversion or entertainment. Do you really think that the world would be a better place if all of those lazy creative people got jobs at mcdonalds instead of making things that bring small moments of joy to billions of people? There would be no books for young children to read, no songs for teenagers to get excited about at their first dance, no movies for old people to be nostalgic about. It takes a lifetime of work to hone the skills necessary to create those things, and a lot of financial and personal risk that most of us aren't willing to assume. I don't know if a 'creative tax' is the right solution, but we could all be a little more understanding.

[easytiger]

And yet, despite this apparently dire situation, their output still exists.

[dredmorbius]

But who is benefiting from its existence? The creators or the current license holders?

[normloman]

That's not completely true. While it's true that some artists just feel entitled to a paycheck, there are other reasons to support paying for content. After all, good music (or good anything) takes a lifetime of practice to make. You have less time to perfect your craft if you're working a full time job doing something else. If some artists are allowed to make a living off their work, or even half a living off their work, the quality of the art improves. So not everyone needs to "grow up." Some have a valid concern.

That said, artists never made much of a living, even before the Internet.

[skylan_q]

While it's true that some artists just feel entitled to a paycheck, there are other reasons to support paying for content.

I have no problems with anyone willing to part with their money for content. I do it myself from time to time. My issue is the sense of entitlement whereby people think they should be getting money because they are performing an activity the feel should earn them money.

[puranjay]

> I do it myself from time to time

Which means that most of the time, you don't pay for content.

Which means that you basically pirate music.

Which means that you are the parasite, not the musician.

[na85]

Perhaps they listen to the radio, youtube, or a free streaming service.

Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions.

[easytiger]

Perhaps they also go to more concerts etc as well.

[puranjay]

The only person who deserves to make a sweeping statement like yours is someone who has never pirated a piece of music, never read a free article, or never watched a YouTube video.

You are not that person. No one is.

If you ask me, you are the parasite here, not the musician who wants to make a living.

[easytiger]

I'm afraid this reply makes no sense at all.

[john_b]

> "valuable"

Your post only uses that word in its economic sense. Thus statements like this:

> "Over time economic cycles destroy things that were once valuable."

Are tautologies, not arguments. The set of things which people find valuable (in the subjective sense of the word, not the economic one) and the set of things which people will pay for are not equal. A great many important works of art were once produced under a patronage system, in which only one person found the artist's work "valuable".

The reason patronage as a system is no longer as prevalent as it once was is because it was once a status symbol, whereas now it is just seen as some sort of hipster endorsement of some niche thing. The ability to offer patronage to an artist was once a display of great wealth and personal connections; now it means you have an internet connection and a few spare bucks. Maybe it can still work, but the social significance of the system has changed.

[puranjay]

You are seriously equating "selling ice" to "making music"?

I thought HN was had smart people. These are the kind of juvenile arguments I've seen snotty 13 year olds make on Reddit.

[easytiger]

Explain the juvinality. A serious business it was sailing to capture ice from an iceberg and damn sight harder in the context of the time than playing guitar.

[dredmorbius]

Another viable option is letting a lot of the content die.

I quite agree with that. Weaponized viral clickbait most especially.

what you do is not valuable to anyone.

Unfortunately for that premise, there are far, far, far too many counterexamples of those who've created hugely valuable works but have died destitute.

Looking beyond the strictly entertainment arts, just addressing a common trope of capitalism: that it's an engine of and greatly rewards innovation.

The tale of the unrewarded genius is legion, one set of substantiation is presented in Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms looking at key inventors of the early Industrial Revolution: John Kay, James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, Reverend Edmund Cartwright, Eli Whitney, and Richard Roberts.

Of the list, Kay, Hargreaves, and Roberts died in poverty. Crompton and Cartwright were granted substantial payments by acts of Parliament (£5,000 and £10,000 respectively), Whitney made money through arms sales to the U.S. government, and of the lot, only Arkwright earned significant wealth, half a million pounds, after his patents stopped being honored by other manufacturers.

See also numerous authors, musicians, artists, playwrights, etc., who've created masterworks but were underappreciated in their own day.

That said, I do agree, somewhat, that the Universe does not owe you a living at your chosen task.

But a bigger issue is that information and markets are very poorly matched.

Market mechanisms work best where goods are uniform (either individually or on aggregate average), their qualities are readily determined (or again tend to average out well), where the fixed costs of production are low and marginal costs of production high (relative to one another), and externalities, both positive and negative, are small relative to market price.

Information goods violate virtually all these assumptions.

⚫ Quality is highly variable.

⚫ Quality assessment is difficult, and often frustrated by other factors (e.g., pay-to-publish journals, "friendly" colleague peer reviews, discussed recently by +Joerg Fliege).

⚫ Variance of individual instances is high enough that averages rarely suffice.

⚫ Fixed costs of production are high, particularly for research, also to an extent for selection, review, and editing.

⚫ Variable costs of production (e.g., publication) are low. In fact we're utilizing a system which was specifically created to reduce those costs still further, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, developed to transmit physics papers between CERN, SLAC, and other related facilities.

⚫ Information goods typically have very high positive externalities -- they benefit those who don't directly consume them. In the case of Dr. Grimm, those who would benefit by treatment of conditions informed by his research. Occasionally they have high negative externalities -- e.g., smallpox, "superflu", or weapons research.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/7Eer...