It’s time to artificially limit the supply of content in order to prop up pay rates, the way we did during the Depression for farmers
In 2020, just 184,000 artists made more than $1,000 from uploading their songs to the Spotify platform. That’s out of a much larger universe of more than 3 million artists on the music platform.
Spotify is one of the lowest paying streaming sites, offering about 1/3 of a penny per stream. Amazon Music pays 4/10 of a cent. Apple Music pays a penny.
To make $1,000 a year, a typical YouTuber needs to get about 1,500 views per day, or more than half a million per year, according to InfluenceMarketingHub.com.
And here on Medium, you can earn somewhere between half a penny and two cents per view (the number varies because the site also factors in how long a reader is engaged with an article). So to make $1,000, you’d need your stories to reach somewhere around 100,000 views.
From the platforms’ point of view, these piecemeal rates make sense, since they’re in the business of selling thousands of eyeballs (or eardrums) at a time to advertisers. Supporting artists or writers isn’t really their problem, and the more content-creators on their sites the better.
It’s the content creators who lose in this game, especially as we are all competing against each other.
So I have a modest proposal.
We need an Agriculture Adjustment Act for online content.
The AAA was part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he pushed through to keep the nation’s farmers from going out of business. During the Depression, American farmers were too productive and demand from overseas was, well, depressed, so prices for agricultural good crashed. Millions of farmers couldn’t make enough money to survive.
So the government started paying farmers to not farm on a portion of their land. Though the AAA itself expired in 1942 after some of its provisions didn’t past muster with the Supreme Court, it lives on in spirit through other federal programs that assist farmers in cooperative marketing of crops and resting of acreage. That’s because we want to keep land from being over-farmed and also to ensure that small family farms don’t disappear.
Today, we have a different problem of overproduction. There’s too much content being created by writers, musicians and other artists. And a lot of it is really good. But many of these creators are lucky if they are making anything like a living wage.
Right now, we’re caught in a race to the bottom as the number of traditional good-paying jobs in journalism and entertainment shrink and creators flood platforms with ever cheaper content.
If you’re not a content creator, why should you care about this? Well, the decline of payments to artists and writers, and the creation of a few “winners take all” who get the lion’s share of money from the mega-platforms, is another way that the middle class is being removed from the economy. And history teaches us that a society with a lot of people making subsistence wages and a few people at the top gaining most of the rewards is not going to be a stable or healthy society. A big middle class is crucial for the health of any democracy.
So here’s my idea. Once a creator has produced a certain amount of content in a given year, be it writing or music or other kinds of art or entertainment, the government offers them a guarantee. In exchange for a monthly retainer, that creator agrees to stop trying to sell anything more. No more uploads to Spotify or YouTube, no more posts on Medium. They get to go do something else with their time, perhaps tackle a harder project or do some kind of community service. Meanwhile, other less prolific creators get a shot at reaching readers, listeners or viewers with less competition and at a more livable rate. That’s because with some artificial scarcity, payment rates would stabilize instead of sliding toward zero.
Call it the Cultural Adjustment Act, in homage to the Agriculture Adjustment Act. Save the family content creator! Their way of life is endangered.