The year 2020 might be one of the most consequential for the 'creative economy' for reasons no one could have foreseen in 2019. It has accelerated many changes, as exemplified by— the unexpectedly explosive growth of Disney+ , the emergence of an obscure history professor as a publishing phenomenon, and the broad cultural influence of a 16-year-old dancer on Tiktok.
One such acceleration is the transformation of online content from almost wholly ad-supported to something where fans or followers directly pay creators. This is evolving so rapidly that it is hard to keep track of all the moving parts for even those of us who are in the middle of the shift, let alone an individual creator. This is my attempt as a primer that should help.
1. One of the earliest arguments for an online economy supported directly by payments from fans was made in 2008 by the Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly. Here is the original piece—”1,000 True Fans”— updated by him, and Li Jin's expansion of the idea.
2. Tim Wu's book is a rigorous history of how 20th century mass media—newspapers, radio, TV and the internet—evolved with the world of advertising. It is a great long view of the media's struggle, especially relevant to the internet in our current moment, between advertising and viewer payment.
3. While the English-language media struggles to survive competition from Big Tech, other online “languages economies,” spoken by billions, have not even been able to take off. My piece.
4. The “creative economy” is wide and deep—entertainment, education, and much more. There are now huge networks of individuals and firms on social media who rival big media in their scale and can thrive even if only a fraction of their fans start paying.
5. The pandemic is one driving force for the new creative economy the other is frictionless mobile payments. And that's the big difference between 2020 and the internet before. Ritesh and I argue here that for creator payments, just like for digital advertising in the 1990s, the shakeout will take time. The early models are already finding traction globally and India's strong payments infrastructure can transform it's creative economy.
6. The paradox of the internet economy is that while individual creators have never had it so good in terms of reach, they do not make any money from all their efforts. Li Jin has been at the forefront of making that case. Here is her latest that frames it exactly right for our current moment - ‘The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class’.
7. China's passion economy is so large, diverse, and different from the rest of the world that it deserves its own list. The one trend most useful to dive into—because it’s ahead of our own—is the growth of an economy around online audio creators.
The seven pieces remind us that the 'creative economy' is different from other industries. Part of it simply is that it is one of the few subjected to the full force of complete digitalization - everything from creating, discovering, watching or reading is now online and hence every part of the industry is in flux. Clips of this 1999 David Bowie interview have gone viral because of his prescient comments about the internet. Asked by the BBC whether the internet is merely a new distribution tool (11 minutes in), he pushes back, saying “the actual context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we can envisage of them at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider, will be so in sympatico, it is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
If you are a creator your head is probably not fully into all the talk of economics and business models. However, in the world of culture and commerce, the balance of power is shifting so dramatically that thinkers, artists, writers, journalists, photographers, or anyone else who makes a living from their ideas simply cannot afford to not pay attention.
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