Artists and the Internet

The internet is great (mostly for those adorable kitten videos) but it also has several flaws of which I’d like to address a specific one in this post. The difficulty for artists to actually make a living online.

[epic background music] We’re in the dawn of automation and artificial intelligence. It will take a large part of our worlds workforce and make it unnecessary within a very short time period. I believe that in 20 years we’ll live in a world with a far stronger focus on art. Laying a proper foundation for that now might be a clever move.

You might think: “Youtube is full of artists, how come that german guy says its hard to make a living on the internet?”. Think about it for a moment, considering the large amount of people having access to the internet, only a very small fraction actually can make a living on it. Those guys literally need millions of views and subscribers to make a living online. Image a musician with concerts with millions of viewers. That guy/girl would make a LOT more money!

So that’s the flaw. The scale just doesn’t fit. Many niche artists have no chance of making a living on the internet and that’s a terrible condition if you ask me.

Some weeks ago I came across Patreon. If you’re an artist and you don’t know this platform yet, check it out! Either way please watch this entertaining and informative ted talk:

This platform offers a pretty neat solution for this problem. Spend some time to think about how you might to support YOUR favourite artist 🙂

Honestly, there is so much rotten stuff on youtube getting far too much attention. Honor to whom honor is due! If/when humanity manages to wipe itself from the face of earth we should go down with style 😉

image by Igor Ovsyannykov