I really thought -- had really hoped -- that Spotify and SoundCloud could make a big middle class of musicians. That the rising nichification of taste and content, made possible through platforms’ transcendence of geography and ability to match idiosyncratic taste with idiosyncratic melodies, would distribute rising music industry revenue so widely that recording artists would be the new auto workers.
And I must be so smart, because people do listen to a lot more music when they have access to unlimited libraries and algorithmic curation. A lot of those new listens go to artists making stranger or more idiosyncratic music, who in the 1990s would have had a hard time finding anyone in their zip code to listen to their music, and who might not have been making music at all. A lot of those artists earn substantial income from Spotify royalties and similar.
But I’m not that smart, because it’s not that many people.
Even if all income earned by artists on streaming platforms was split evenly, and Drake didn’t earn any more recording revenue than Max Graham, there would only be enough income to go around to support a few hundred thousand middle class incomes. And the same trend applies to painters, movie producers, or any other creators for whom the total aggregate consumption of their work is constrained by highly fintie factors, like hours in the day, or empty space on walls or in closets. We can’t listen to enough music, buy enough clothes, or hang enough paintings to support a large, national mythology-defining middle class of musicians, fashion designers, and fine artists.
An interesting possibility for my hopeful hypothesis is the potential internetification of physical goods through vastly improved 3D printing capability. Under this dream scenario, idealized by Jaron Lanier in Who Owns the Future? and by the automotive startup Local Motors, physical goods will at some point no longer be manufactured at centralized hubs and distributed to households. Instead, clothes, cars, spatulas, and coasters will be printed in your garage from new or recycled raw materials. Design specs for these products would move from household to household like so many songs are today.
This technological state of affairs could in theory lead to a new pattern of consumption of physical goods. Instead of buying new clothes a few times a year, you might try a new style of shirt every single day. Instead of considering a few dozen clothing designs each month, you might consider a few dozen each morning, deciding what outfit strikes your moor. Getting dressed as choosing a playlist or a podcast. Each one of those designs would (again in theory) need a human designer, and (again in theory), a single human’s ability to dream up creative designs in a certain space of time will not have sped up too much. So there would be demand for an exponentially greater number of clothing designers than there is today.
And that’s just clothing designers. What about people whose vocation is creating digital designs for lamps, toothbrushes, bedspread, or anything else we can imbue with self-expressive value? Consumers might feel like changing the form of every object around them to suit their mood. Maybe people will be constantly exploring and tweaking the appearance of everything around them as resonance waxes and wanes. Prevailing design styles in goods of all kinds could fluctuate with the day, not the season. People could suddenly start to notice fine gradations of experience in response to the appearance of their surroundings, and strive to optimize their moment-to-moment sensations of beauty or delight. They could move about their homes and offices could exist in a near constant state of immersion in their aesthetic whimsy, feeding a workforce that exists to engineer what’s bright and new to an unimaginable scale. An economy no longer build to distribute stuff, but scarce subjective wonder.
But this is highly speculative and requires technological leaps and bounds that are not assured or even likely.
So an equation remains unsolved: if the growth in existing professions centered around creativity is inherently limited, than how can the unused creative capacity in everyone human be economically employed? Especially, as seems possible, if their rote and basic logical functions are no longer valuable?