You still need to get lucky to be famous on Twitch (or Youtube) for your distribution channel and have enough influence that whatever you make, people will care about it.

Also they don't own their audience in this case, Twitch does.

Although given that we're talking about content set inside World of Warcraft, if this ever actually started making Disney-level money then you can bet your bottom dollar that Blizzard will come seeking their pound of flesh (and don't bother arguing that this would be foolish and self-destructive, this is Blizzard we're talking about).

for some context, some of Blizzard's previous self destructive antics:

Starcraft 2: refused to let existing Korean SC1 leagues/orgs play SC2. leagues (vast majority of esports audience) simply stayed on SC1 rather than submit

Overwatch: terminated license for all third party OW tournaments, so they could launch official Overwatch League (which then failed)

WC3 reforged: so unreliable (kept dropping games in progress, ruining everyone) that everyone just gave up

It's a tool. The people you see using it now are the early adopters and the hustlers.

You'll see the young artists picking it up soon. I know several awards winning VFX industry folks that love playing with it, but they're afraid to tell their colleagues.

Joel Haver's use of EbSynth [1] is probably an indication of how this will be used successfully at first. Strong sketch comedy and improv performers using AI to elevate their visual presentation. From there it'll grow.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=SY3y6zNTiLs

Obviously. Because if it was trained on previous VFX artist work and now puts VFX artists out of work it's a bit icky to talk about with fellow artists. But also because if they use it then more likely you are out first. Eventually they are out too, when studios/platforms/owners realize they can just use the tool directy and skip the middleman, but until then it's a charade where everyone pretends it's not happening and all is fine while house burns down.

See the situation in modern indie videogames: Today a small team does what used to take a huge team a couple of decades ago, but you still have projects that have so much budget you cannot touch them with a small team, and difficulties getting good, small games to find audiences, as they need to deal with a different set of gatekeepers. You'll need some influencer, a blogger, or some social network algo, which can be gamed, to give you exposure. Success without paying is not impossible, but the easy route is through paying. And how much will people pay? More than you want.

Even in a world without physical scarcity, if you want eyeballs and clout, scarcity will still exist because real fame and success is limited. And based on who are the most popular organic-ish influencers, you might not like the kind of person who wins.

Still not enough to live off it but if you consider that literally anyone can publish music it's not surprising.

The Bandcamp is there for people who don’t want a Spotify-mediated experience.

I'm not sure how awesome this future is when you reference Steam, a service where we own nothing. Then Bandcamp which has been a positive force originally, but bought up by the worst kinds of companies more than once recently.

Any recommendations? How do you find the good stuff?

On the content front, studios have benefited massively by selling sure bets in a sea of noise: of the top 10 box office films of 2024, there isn't a single original IP, every single film is either an adaptation or sequel to prior work made long ago. [1]. I view this as part of a broader "flight towards quality" pattern in the internet age - even if there's tons of great content online (orders of magnitude more), the viewing public still ultimately values both studio curation and IP familiarity. This goes beyond the films themselves: the studio IP rights moat includes the access to famous big-name actors that fill seats, the IP rights to use their likeness, and access to their personal platforms to push the film, all of which these studios control. Even if indies can generate "a person" or "a movie", the inability to legally generate "specific people that the public knows and likes without their permission" or "specific movies set in universes they know and care about" represents moat that isn't leaving studio's hands in a world of widespread AI.

Separate from IP rights, it also assumes a hyper-specific model of how AI specialization and use will look if it's widely available. For example, even assuming AI that can generate anything you ask for, it's likely that people will continue valuing significant sound, music, and visual post-processing to augment end-state AI generations to better match and personalize a final vision differentiated from the models themselves. This means labor costs, which indies at scale would continue to lack access to. This also assumes a model of the world where AI becomes a reducer of specialization, which isn't guaranteed: even assuming superhuman production capabilities by AI, such that there is no longer any individual human input on some aspect of the film, someone has to point the superhuman AI in productive directions that map to somewhere good in the quality spectrum, and it's likely that there will be significant differentiation in human skill at this task across different domains, as one can think of the superhuman AI as a tool being consumed by a skilled collaborator, even if the AI is doing most of the work. In the event that this is the case, studios can and will continue having much bigger labor budgets to continue to differentiate themselves on quality compared to indies trying to DIY this process.

And lastly, marketing is still king. About half of a modern big-budget picture's budget gets spent on the marketing today, only the other half goes towards making the actual film. Even if state-of-the-art Hollywood grade AI means anyone can produce a shot-for-shot reproduction of any current Hollywood film, ultimately, people need to find the content in order to watch it, and even in a world with widely available AI, it's the indie's marketing budget of ~$0 dollars, versus the major studio's marketing budget of $50,000,000-$200,000,000. I would happily continue betting against indies winning this fight, especially when the low end of this market, which is already oversaturated and hard to meaningfully stand out in, is drowned out in an order of magnitude more noise from low-end AI creators flooding the space with slop.

[1] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2024/