John, I appreciate your faith. My title “BROKEN LOGIC” was admittedly a bit knee jerk on my part. Still it comes from a place of genuine concern for readers of the piece. You have clearly thought a bunch about this question, so lets do have that discussion! Perhaps you can educate me on this. (Note: I too am excited for the possibilities of Web 3.0 as a way of reshaping society for the better. cool!)
Let me jump straight to the crux of my concern: Using your numbers from spotify for example we see that of the 8M contributors only 7.5K earn more than $100K. This means .1% of the contributors earn 100K. Now likely many contributing on spotify have zero intent to even make money… they are doing it just to express themselves. Lets assume only 10% even have an intent to make money. 90% don’t. But then among those who intend to make money, just as you speculate… they are not very serious about it… they are not really making sacrifices in their lives to make it happen. lets say that is 90% of those trying to make money. (They are the middle class that you correctly say will never exist in the content economy.) but then there is the 10% of the 10%. These guys ARE making making sacrifices in their lives year after year, to build a following, to put stuff out all the time. doing all the right things. they are the 1%-ers husler’s husler! Give it their all!
Guess what, according to your numbers, 90% of THEM are not hitting that 100K mark. (And because you and I understand the natural of a smooth power law, most of them are weighted towards the lower end of their range, well away from that 100K mark.
So we just encouraged folks to try to escape that top 10% “middle class” to really go the extra mile to be in the elite 1% class. And that bought them a ONE-IN-TEN chance of making 100K. The rest are likely earning $20K/year while busting their ass to be in the 1% club. UGH!
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What make matters worse is the mathematics of where that money comes from. It comes from a for profit entity (Spotify). No matter what, they money spotify gives will be some fairly fixed fraction of their income per subscriber to their artists. but notice as you encourage more and more of the 8M contributors to be super hustlers, you are NOT increasing the pie that is being split. You need to increase the number of spotify subscribers to do that. What you are doing is to increase the workload of BEING a 1%er.
We are on the titanic and the number of spotify $100K life boats is fixed, you are just encouraging GREATER competition for a fix number of lifeboats. this just means that the emotional pain requrired to get to this 1% status has increased, but the total payout available has not. The result is more broken hearts, NOT more paid performers.
This is why I don’t like your advice. For me it is the stereotypical statements I heard when I was growing up about how sports was “the way out” for minorities. I hated it! because it is encouraging folk to run away from less lucrative paths which had a much much much greater chance of success in order to all shoot for an elusive spot in a tiny zero sum game. UGH!
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Now the creator economy is interesting. If totally new non-corporate entities provide 100% of proceeds directly to creators it could give an interesting bump to the creator economy. (this has nothing to do with encouraging participation in the current for profit system.)
Still that bump will be limited. the problem that remains with the knowledge economy is that knowledge is infinitely replicable (a song counts a “knowledge” in this context). So there will still be a tendency within a planet-wide marketplace for thing to gravitate towards the top tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a percent. But maybe with the right economic model that money can be pushed out more widely. Dunno.
Its all a big problem.
but I don’t agree with Sahil Blom, it is not the best time to be an entrepreneur. It is the EASIEST time to be one. but with that ease comes an increased competition for what is at the end of the day, a mostly fix size pie.
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that is alot to swallow. what are your thoughts?
— dan
