The key skill for creatives (in any medium) will be marketing. Being good at the thing you do is table-stakes. Being good at marketing to create the audience will be the key divider between profitable artist/musician/writer/etc and aspiring amateur.
So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating.
This is basically what publishing houses & record labels do, but they're still so caught up in the actual physical production of stuff. Now everything is digital there's no actual need to make books or records.
There'll be a new set of "promoters" who handle the hottest new talent. Getting signed with one of them is the guarantee that you've "made it" and you might actually be able to make a living from this.
Then the promoters will be publishing their own collections of stuff, or creating their own subscription services, or finding some other way of cross-promoting their creatives to the audience of the other creatives they manage. Then it becomes a matter of choosing which promoter(s) you want to follow.
And then we're back to where we were, with gatekeepers for content.
>So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating.
Well, that's basically what you hire a public relations person for. The problem is that now you're having to invest, perhaps significantly, in making a bigger impact.
There's a misalignment of incentives, though. Hiring a PR person is different from signing a contract with a promoter/publisher/marketing partner.
The PR person wants to be noticed by journalists. They get paid the same regardless of how much money the creative makes. But their next gig depends on being noticed by journalists.
The marketing partner wants to sell lots of whatever it is that the creative makes. They're on a % of sales (or more usually, it's the other way around and the creative earns royalties based on sales). They need to build an interested audience that they can then market to for other creatives.
I fully agree. In fact, I think (hope) that most of the writers who are selling only hundreds of copies of their books are actually just bad marketers. I think this is why the myth of the Big Four publishing house exists, because those publishing houses used to come in and scoop the writer out of obscurity by marketing their book. Now they look for a writer who already has a big platform so they don't have to spend the marketing budget and can wind up with a "sure thing."
If instagram is a model, then its already started. My feed is basically just guitars/bass/drums and motorcycles. There are these instagram pages who “promote” other pages who pay them. Once the creator is large enough they can decouple and let the feed algorithm work.
Same goes for meme pages, actual models/actors. My guess is this is nascent stage before it really becomes a dominant force for filtering/promoting content.
The key skill for creatives (in any medium) will be marketing. Being good at the thing you do is table-stakes. Being good at marketing to create the audience will be the key divider between profitable artist/musician/writer/etc and aspiring amateur.
So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating.
This is basically what publishing houses & record labels do, but they're still so caught up in the actual physical production of stuff. Now everything is digital there's no actual need to make books or records.
There'll be a new set of "promoters" who handle the hottest new talent. Getting signed with one of them is the guarantee that you've "made it" and you might actually be able to make a living from this.
Then the promoters will be publishing their own collections of stuff, or creating their own subscription services, or finding some other way of cross-promoting their creatives to the audience of the other creatives they manage. Then it becomes a matter of choosing which promoter(s) you want to follow.
And then we're back to where we were, with gatekeepers for content.