illuminations-of-eternal-warfare:
I noticed a rise of people and companies promoting the idea of being online an artist.These people get massive amounts of subscribers on youtube from their grifting.
Yeah, so I see one of these Artists that built their career on art career and coaching videos and I strongly doubt all 430k of his subscribers are going to have an art career if they’ll just work hard enough.
Related Articles
The danger of these videos is that they may lead people to actually investing into becoming professional online artists when 90% of people who studied fine art can’t make it as a artists.
The basic problem of the art market is that one is operating on market over-saturated with artists and over-saturated with free stuff and desperate people.
Demonetisation of online art driven by the internet art galleries like DA and social media means that Vast Majority of followers are there just for a freebie.
And it gets so bad that vast majority of followers won’t ever interact with your work again after following you.
Like you (and the algorithm) can’t know whenever they like your work or love it or if it got lost in an endless dashboard because they follow 1000 blogs or if they find most of your work meh or if they think it sucks but just won’t bother to unfollow you because vast majority won’t bother to press the like button.
Online art market is numbers a game and the numbers are against you.
Literally:
You get something like this:
1 in 20 will bother to interact with buttons.
1 in 250 will bother to pay.
To understand what demonetisation does to value of work of online artists, look at these numbers:
150k followers.
If half of these followers would purchase 1$ tier on patreon, you’d get something like 75k $ per month - costs.
But demonetisation means that as a star artist you’ll get something like 4k per month from 600 patrons - costs.
The main entity benefiting financially from online artists here are art gallery and social media sites that use them as adbaits and subscription baits.
Yeah there are people who can get several thousands dollars per month but they need to gather a ridiculously huge audience that is overwhelmingly non-interacting and even more overwhelmingly demonetised.
Another type of exploitation of artists is done by print sites that aim to collect majority of money paid buy buyers and leave artists scraps. Artists are expected to provide their own audience but default royalties are similar to those paid by publishers that do mass promotion and mass distribution of prints/merchandise.
Recently saw one of the aforementioned grifters doing a paid promotion of a print-on-demand site site that offers the worst conditions I’ve seen so far - 10% of print price which can’t be changed.
It’s something that I’ve noticed by observing stuff like Patreon numbers, numbers of followers, etc. and contrasting it with the overwhelming propaganda of success that is being put out but I recently learned there was one writer that made a book working with tons of artist about the problem of demonetisation of art due to the internet - his name is William Deresiewicz and the book is “Death of the Artist”.
A spectacular example of demonetisation of art is Spotify. Spotify allows listeners to listen as much music as they want and then pays the artists according to number of streamings.
Here’s where the catch is - Spotify subscription costs 9,99$ per month and average user listens to 4,5 hours of music per day. That’s 9,99$ divided into about 2000 streamings.
Recently tens of thousands of people were reblogging a petition against Spotify underpaying artists without understanding that it’s them that is the real problem and that Spotify is underpaying artists in their name.
