Re:Unhappy Birthday
by anigbrowl on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @06:11PM
(#9608020)
because the real cost of labour the creator must put in to receive royalties on every new sale or performance tends to zero.
Of course, but you have much higher up front costs than the baker, who can bake less during periods of slack demand. You can't paint half of a picture and sell it for half the price you wanted to get. I'm not sure why you think a commodity model is even relevant here. An artistic work has a lot more in common with the erection of a building, which involves large amounts of labor and capital up front, in exchange for an ongoing stream of economic rents over the longer term.
(I'm discounting the cost of marketing etc., which in most cases has only a second-order effect and doesn't change the final result.)
A very dubious assumption. Marketing matters quite a lot IMHO, and certainly as far as films go there's a pretty strong correlation between the marketing budget and the probability of making a financial return. You micht like to check out the reference sources in this article, particularly Vogel: https://storyality.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/storyality-24-on...
Add to this the income which copyright brokers receive from media distributors etc. without having any part in the creative process, and things become very unbalanced real quick.
But it's not just creative, it's administrative as well. If you're a writer you don't want to spend half your time trying to audit your distributors.
It would be much better if the artist could make dealings directly with the audience
That's not realistic in the case of literary works, because you're still up against the copying problem - the text of a book is very easy to copy and it is the product itself.
As Syd Barrett put it: "All middle men are bad."
Much as I admire Syd Barrett artistically, have you considered that he was a) literally incompetent in the mental health sense, and b) that his economic wellbeing was to a large extent dependent on the good will of his former bandmates who ensured that he received royalty monies from record sales? Without their efforts as middlemen he'd probably have ended up institutionalized or homeless.
There's a romantic viewpoint that middlemen in the arts world are all parasitic. They're not; usually the relationship is much more symbiotic, with different parties bringing different skills to the table. So people in Hollywood may grumble about agents in a general sense, but nobody who has one is in a hurry to go back to repping themselves unless they get so rich and famous as to set up their own production company, in which case they hire people to do a lot of the same work.
Of course, but you have much higher up front costs than the baker, who can bake less during periods of slack demand. You can't paint half of a picture and sell it for half the price you wanted to get. I'm not sure why you think a commodity model is even relevant here. An artistic work has a lot more in common with the erection of a building, which involves large amounts of labor and capital up front, in exchange for an ongoing stream of economic rents over the longer term.
(I'm discounting the cost of marketing etc., which in most cases has only a second-order effect and doesn't change the final result.)
A very dubious assumption. Marketing matters quite a lot IMHO, and certainly as far as films go there's a pretty strong correlation between the marketing budget and the probability of making a financial return. You micht like to check out the reference sources in this article, particularly Vogel: https://storyality.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/storyality-24-on...
Add to this the income which copyright brokers receive from media distributors etc. without having any part in the creative process, and things become very unbalanced real quick.
But it's not just creative, it's administrative as well. If you're a writer you don't want to spend half your time trying to audit your distributors.
It would be much better if the artist could make dealings directly with the audience
That's not realistic in the case of literary works, because you're still up against the copying problem - the text of a book is very easy to copy and it is the product itself.
As Syd Barrett put it: "All middle men are bad."
Much as I admire Syd Barrett artistically, have you considered that he was a) literally incompetent in the mental health sense, and b) that his economic wellbeing was to a large extent dependent on the good will of his former bandmates who ensured that he received royalty monies from record sales? Without their efforts as middlemen he'd probably have ended up institutionalized or homeless.
There's a romantic viewpoint that middlemen in the arts world are all parasitic. They're not; usually the relationship is much more symbiotic, with different parties bringing different skills to the table. So people in Hollywood may grumble about agents in a general sense, but nobody who has one is in a hurry to go back to repping themselves unless they get so rich and famous as to set up their own production company, in which case they hire people to do a lot of the same work.