
The Pomplamoose Problem: Artists Can't Survive as Saints and Martyrs - acangiano
http://www.artistempathy.com/blog/the-pomplamoose-problem-artists-cant-survive-as-saints-and-martyrs
======
jarcane
_“We love your music,” the public seems to be saying, “but we aren’t going to
pay for it anymore. "_

This is utterly and painfully familiar to me.

Before I dove into retraining as a programmer, I was a self-published tabletop
roleplaying author.

Tabletop RPGs are an incredibly small space, and part of the reason they are a
small space is that no one pays anyone for anything. I wasn't even self-
published because I didn't have publisher interest in my work: I was self-
published because when publishers approached me and I sent them quotes asking
for less than a penny per word, they would still balk and tell me it was too
much money or just stop responding to my emails.

And yet, when you talk about this publicly, when you discuss that maybe the
reason so many of the industry's most legendary designers all leave and write
for video games is because they literally weren't making enough to live,
people react to you with hostility and derision. You may as well be spouting
Marxist propaganda on the street corner, all for the crime of suggesting that
someone actually be paid enough for their work to make it worth doing.

You hear new ideas, things like pay-what-you-want, or free-ebook schemes,
which conveniently all seem to involve giving them something for free with the
understanding that somehow this will magically turn into more sales.

It rarely does. IF you're big enough and visible enough, or when you first
make a splash on the scene, some of these tricks can work for a short time.
What actually happened in all but one occasion was that a whole hell of a lot
of people just decided they were more happy to get something for nothing and
my sales actually went down (though downloads of course, went up.)

Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that
this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists
literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a
medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience
has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively
zero.

They're still all too happy to watch/read/play the hell out of it, and tell
you how amazing your thing is.

Just don't ask them to give you any money for it.

~~~
anigbrowl
_Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that
this is what we 've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists
literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a
medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience
has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively
zero._

Quite. The big gain of copyright was to liberate artists from that to some
degree and put them on an economic footing of productivity, where their work
could be valued for its commercial potential, with the reasonable proviso that
people who wanted to enjoy it would pay to purchase it in some form. Despite
the flaws of the publishing industry this worked pretty well and there was a
cultural explosion that paralleled the industrial revolution.

In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of
resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists
shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And
while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any
other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers
shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers.

I read the original Pomplamoose piece and while I respected the position of
'hey we're a startup, and while we haven't made it we are making it, plus
being in a band is awesome' it nonetheless radiated an air of desperation. The
cold hard reality is that you can do a 2 month tour, play to packed houses of
paying fans, and still lose $10,000. Criticisms that they paid too much for
the stage show are misplaced; it costs money to hire those things, and you
need some of those things so that people say your show was fun and exciting
rather than dull and boring. People go to a concert to be entertained, after
all. Traditionally, bands signed deals with labels because labels have the
capital and know-how to promote music, much as studios have the capital and
know-how to put out films and so forth. It's very very hard to build up that
capital organically, and it's also very hard to produce a marketable product
without a capital investment.

~~~
ForHackernews
> I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because
> they like playing with computers.

I really don't expect anyone to pay me for the open-source experimentation I
put on github for free. But if you want me to write the boring line-of-
business application for your company, then I want to get paid.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
Yet the attitude you express here is used as a justification for the
suppression of pay in this industry. Open source is a boon and a bane in that
regard, because companies are unlikely to distinguish between the two contexts
you note. And they have a large source of useful idiots who will happily play
along.

~~~
coldtea
Plus that's how we get shitty OpenSSL code and the like, that everybody uses,
but nobody bothers improving...

------
tunesmith
One thing I'm really happy about regarding this article and the accompanying
blog post from Pomplamoose is that it pretty much devastates the argument of
"you shouldn't expect to make money from selling recordings; release your
recordings for free because all the real money is from touring and
merchandise!"

People can quibble about how much they spent on lights etc but none of it
would have made an order of magnitude difference. Plus, Pomplamoose is
comparatively _huge_ \- I've seen that touring/merch argument made against the
indie that only has 1-2 CDs out and simply wants their cd/recordings sales to
cover the production costs of recording the CDs.

I wish Pomplamoose had broken out their "merch" number - how much was from
selling posters/t-shirts, and how much was from selling CDs? The fact that
they were even bundled together almost as an afterthought is another
indication of how devalued it has become.

~~~
Pxtl
At the same time, look at how we comics do the same. Their primary output is
free/ad-supported and their main source of direct income from customers is
side-projects, merch, and donations.

~~~
tunesmith
What do you mean by comics?

~~~
Pxtl
Bah, _web_ comics. Typo.

------
teddyh
Since we don’t have a “Basic Income”, to survive in society you have to
provide value to others¹, i.e. make money. If you want to spend your time
being an artist, you still have to make money.

The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost. A
non-rivalrous good with zero marginal cost will therefore trend towards a
price of zero. Digital copies of things fall under this category. _Therefore_
, you cannot expect to be able to make money by having a profit margin on each
item sold on these types of products. You cannot make money _this way_.

You may lament this fact, but it is the reality. You will have to make money
_some other way_. There will probably never arise a perfect substitute. The
worst case scenario is that the modern but pre-digital age was a golden age
for production of these kinds of now-digitizeable things, just as ancient
Egypt was a golden age for the production of pyramids.

But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and you can’t complain that
there isn’t any substitute business model to cover your situation. Reality is
what it is.

① [http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-
yo...](http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-
person/)

~~~
jarcane
Bluntly, this argument (which is tiresomely familiar to me at this point)
strikes me as nothing so much as self-fulfilling justification.

Thing X doesn't pay, therefore I don't have to pay you for Thing X, you
should've gone into something else if you wanted money.

Baloney. I can think of no other field where the kinds of man-hours involved
are as devalued. Yes, supply is generous, but so is _demand_ , at
unprecedented levels in human history. We are a culture grown fat and rich off
its own cultural products, yet which routinely refuses to actually pay for any
of them.

Labor isn't free in almost any other market, so why should you get to demand
someone work 80+ hours a week for nothing? Explain to me how that fits any
sane market theory.

~~~
teddyh
If you want to get paid, then you’d better do something which makes money.
It’s as simple as that. In the current technological world, digital goods
cannot make money by using the method which was, in the past, used to make
money for the things which are now digital. (This is _not_ to say that they
cannot make money _some other way_.)

You comment looks like a sweat-of-the-brow argument. Like, if I spend a lot of
effort and time doing something, and then as a result have a product which the
world doesn’t value, why should I still get paid?

> _We are a culture grown fat and rich off its own cultural products, yet
> which routinely refuses to actually pay for any of them._

If this could be shown and quantified, then we would have the data necessary
to create some system to use this effect to national advantage. But we don’t,
so we can’t.

Also, I think you are arguing disingenuously when you say that I “ _demand
someone work 80+ hours a week for nothing_ ”. I do not. People are free to do
whatever they want, and will get compensated according to what they can get
paid from other people.

~~~
jarcane
People have been refusing to pay artists for longer than there has been
digital copying.

~~~
teddyh
No more than people have been refusing to pay for work in general. With
digital copying, the situation changes fundamentally.

------
Pxtl
Welcome to every artistic endeavor ever. You go into a field for love, you
have to pay for the privilege by competing against an overcrowded market
because _everybody_ is making a labor of love.

To me, the real solution is not go pay more for labours of love, but to
institute a shorter workweek so everybody can pursue their own labours of love
on the side.

~~~
dnautics
that makes it worse, because you'll increase the supply and drive the price
down.

~~~
Flimm
Are we trying to maximise the number of people creating good art, or the
number of people making a living out of art? It's not the same thing.

~~~
tunesmith
That's really the heart of it. Everything has moved so fast that I don't think
we understand the first principles of the system.

For a while I believed that all the new music production tools out there meant
that the market is flooded with crappy music released by hobbyists giving it
away for free. The system affects of that sort of thing is that the listeners
are bombarded, they shut down, they don't have the opportunity to reliably
discover "good" music, and that therefore people writing "good" music fall
through the cracks, don't earn money, eventually stop writing, and culture is
worse off.

But... I'm coming around to the view that the market is pretty much flooded
now with "good" music. I'm being hand-wavy, defining it as merely music that
deserves to exist alongside other "good" music. If that's true, then it's a
different model. Great for the consumer, they can probably subsist on a
healthy music diet received for free. There the only path through for a
musician is to try and invite fans into the "family" and hope fans will pay a
premium for that. But still, you're going to have artists that write good
music fall through the cracks and stop writing - it's just that in those
cases, culture isn't necessarily worse off.

------
ForHackernews
> “We love your music,” the public seems to be saying, “but we aren’t going to
> pay for it anymore. Of course, please keep making it – but you’ll have to
> find another way to do it."

Ok, so this is going to be controversial, but...do we really _need_ people to
keep making art? At least as a profitable venture?

There's already more art, music, movies, books existent than I could ever
experience in a hundred lifetimes, and there's no reason to think that
recently-created art is better or more interesting than older art. It's not
like it's getting stale. Would it really be that bad if artists stopped making
art? If people don't want to pay for it, maybe artists should stop? Eventually
maybe society would want to pay for it again?

~~~
tszyn
People do want new art. Just look at the most torrented works of art -- far
more people download Game of Thrones than I Love Lucy. One major reason is
that societies change and today's audiences are different from audiences of 30
years ago.

The reason people don't want to pay for art is not that they assign a value of
zero to it; it's that they have figured out a way to get it without paying the
artist.

------
quadrangle
Nobody explains the situation better than Corey Doctorow:
[http://archive.dconstruct.org/culture/free](http://archive.dconstruct.org/culture/free)

Making a living as an artist is a dream only the tiniest fraction of
privileged people have ever been able to do. Of all the economic injustices in
the world, the fact that it's a lot of work to scrape by providing some
awesome entertainment is not one that justifies a lot of sympathy and
certainly not one that we should destroy cultural freedom and technological
freedom over. It's nice to be transparent, and I don't mind Pomplamoose's
original article. The artistempathy.com article is hyperbolic and out of
touch.

------
zephl
a response: [http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/574-op-
ed/](http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/574-op-ed/)

------
Animats
When we see a shortage of rock bands, then there's a problem. There isn't. At
one point there were 13.5 million bands on Myspace. With Band-In-A-Box and
AutoTune, anyone can make music now. All music worth hearing is on line, so
anyone can listen to a band that's better than you.

The musician as star concept dates from the vinyl and radio era, when
manufacturing and distribution of records, and getting airplay, created a mass
market for rock stars. That was a brief historical anomaly. For centuries,
almost all musicians were nobodies, outranked by bartenders. Now, with the
tools for making and distributing music available to everyone, we're back
there.

You are in a business where, unless you're really good and really well
promoted, you don't matter. Deal with it.

Read:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_yo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_your_garage_band)

------
coldtea
That's the problem with lots of other professions, in an age where tons of
skills become obsolete, either because tools, knowledge and opportunities to
learn become too widespread (e.g. recording music, video making, photography,
journalism -- millions enter a market that can only sustain 1/1000 of them
because the barriers to entry are now much lower), or because they got
automated / migrated to China, etc.

The usual BS about "being creative", "practicing hard" and getting a leg up
the competition is also not really helpful. It's just advice for the
individual, not a systemic solution to a problem (that might not even have
one).

------
davidgerard
Macroeconomics, supply and demand: the problem for artists is (1) that they
are not the slightest bit scarce (2) amateurs can do it too, and do (3) the
ensuing macroeconomic race to the bottom (4) the public mostly aren't
aesthetes, they just want something good enough to fill their subcultural
needs.

So art goes back to being for trust fund babies and people with day jobs.
Successful artists need to find a _cultural_ niche and work it.

[http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-
aesthe...](http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-
punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/)

------
rcarmo
I honestly don't get why they got that much flak over a few bill items. Would
it have been any better for them to hide how much they paid for various parts
of their show?

(So what if they paid X for lights? If they wanted _those_ lights... etc.)

~~~
eropple
_> I honestly don't get why they got that much flak over a few bill items_

Because it discredits them. It isn't far off from when Fox News dismisses the
problems of poverty with "but they have refrigerators" or when people (often
around here) yet to reorient reality so that the cause of poverty is buying $5
quality-of-life improvements instead of societal economic intent.

It helps folks sleep at night.

------
Mz
_Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts
to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the
audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is
effectively zero._
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745759)

 _They are a business. If they didn 't make money, or even lost money, then
they didn't take care of the financial side of things._
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405)

I have a problem with both of these ideas (from different comments here, and I
did cite them). First of all, I think it is in the best interest of the world
to make a lot of stuff freely available to the masses. I think the world is a
better place when some things are readily available. It is a form of public
education. I don't want culture to be something only rich people can afford.

Having said that, yeah, if you are doing something creative, it takes a lot of
your time and you should be compensated but that doesn't mean business stuff
comes naturally to creative types.

I have a done a lot of stuff over the years that I have reason to believe
benefited other people. I don't feel I have gotten enough financially out of
it. I don't think that is just a case of me being stupid and not business-
savvy. I think some things are just hard to monetize and I also think some
things are hard to accomplish at all and may be impossible to accomplish if
you have to worry about how to also monetize it.

I am encouraged that we now have things like Patreon. I am encouraged that we
are coming up with new alternatives like that. I still don't know how to
effectively pull off the things I want to do and also monetize them. But one
thing I am clear on is that I would like some things to be freely available
because I don't want some things only available the The Haves. I think that
increases the divide between The Haves and The Have Nots. And I think that is
one reason monetizing art is a hard problem to solve: Because it shouldn't
just be for the rich. It should enrich the lives of many. Yet, no, the artists
should not all be starving artists either. I am not a fan of martyrdom.

------
bitwize
This is why virtually every small-time musician I ever spoke to called for
some sort of unobtrusive, universal DRM -- and if you care about music, you
should too.

~~~
imaginenore
And it's stupid. It won't stop your art from being pirated. It will only make
the lives of your legitimate customers more difficult.

~~~
coldtea
I don't know. I've seen DRM that has never been cracked for quite popular
software. Propellerheads Reason for one.

~~~
bitwize
Notator for Atari ST has never been cracked either. Its primary author, Dr.
Gerhard Lengeling, is a multitalented genius who spent as much time on the
copy protection scheme as he did on the software itself.

Some people really want to be paid for their work.

------
Grue3
The bands who know what they're doing, even small bands, do make money from
tours:

[http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-
on-t...](http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-on-tour)

The problem with Pomplamoose is that they spent a ridiculous amount of money
on silly things. Their loss.

------
ForHackernews
I find a little bit telling that HN has basically no sympathy for cab drivers,
whose job formerly paid a living wage (protected by that reliable bogeyman
"government regulation") but whose livelihoods are now under assault from any
number of "disruptive" startups.

But as soon as creative class workers are threatened, HN is falling all over
itself defending copyright law (a government regulation!) as just and right
and natural.

