The thing about classic literature is that it’s mostly written by people with money. Chaucer was a civil servant and MP. Milton served in Oliver Cromwell’s government, Lord Byron was obviously a member of the House of Lords (inheriting that office at the ripe old age of 21) – even Jane Austen had money. She wasn’t rich, but her father was rector at one of the Oxford colleges. She was gentry. She was the poorest sort of gentry, but she wasn’t working on a farm. All of these people had money and means. They had financial stability. In many cases, they had family support – if they didn’t have financial stability themselves, they were propped up by their rich uncles. There’s not a lot of classic literature without that support. Even Shakespeare fell in with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a performing company financially supported by the Lord Chamberlain. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the Lord Chamberlain was replaced as patron by King James I – the literal king of England paid for Shakespeare to spend his time writing plays. They’re either rich, or they’re funded by the rich.

And I’m not about to argue that things today are as bad as they were in the thirteenth century, right. That’s not a good comparison. We can simply acknowledge that when we do see successful working class artists, these actors or writers from lower class backgrounds – that’s a relatively recent thing. It’s not common throughout history, and it’s probably becoming less common again today, as a result of our current economic issues. Some of it’s not even directly due to economics, in how we might typically define the term – it’s not just about inflation or something. Some of it’s about more complicated factors, like technology. We talk about how Spotify, for instance, has killed album sales. People used to buy real physical albums, but with streaming services – iTunes, YouTube, whatever – it’s easier to stream music for free. That’s wiped out a major revenue source for artists, pushing them instead towards tours, where in turn there are concerns about mega-corporates like Live Nation monopolising venues and taking massive chunks out of the ticket fees, to the point where many artists just don’t feel they can make a living in music any more. In an ABC news article, one band talk about walking away with 9% of their ticket sales – $100,000 in ticket sales, and $9,000 in the bank. (What’s that Macklemore song on The Heist? “After taxes, you and Ryan have seven percent to split!”) The technology changes the economics of music. It changes the dominant business models. And the tech has its own economic drivers: Spotify tells us that they take about a third of any revenue earned on their platform, which is really just another chunk out of the money flowing towards the artist. I remember listening to an Australian musician (to my embarrassment I’ve not been able to find her name again) talk about this problem of hollowing out the musician middle class. You’ve got Taylor Swift, and you’ve got the guy who plays at the local pub on the weekend, and there’s increasingly not much in between. The avenues for getting into that middle class – where you’re making a respectable, reasonable income as an artist, or even a bare minimum living wage – they’re getting thinner. They’re getting harder to navigate, making the industry more difficult for people who aren’t already rich.

And I don’t want to suggest that the only issue here is corporate greed. It’s a factor, but it’s not the only factor. There’s a lot of talk about monopolies, and media centralising under these massive umbrella corporations like Disney or Amazon, but we should also acknowledge that we’ve seen a massive explosion in the opportunities available for everyday people to make and distribute art. YouTube sees around five hundred hours of video uploaded every minute. We talked about this back in 2021, in an essay on attention span – while a lot of those hours will be slop put out by video farms, a lot of it will be real people making weird little recordings for their friends. Video production and distribution is available to the average person like never before. The same is true of Spotify: according to Spotify metrics, there are 12 million artists on the platform. We should be a little bit suspicious of those numbers, which Spotify uses to ward off critiques around artist payouts (arguing that any low payouts are because they’re splitting the pool amongst a massive creator base), but at the same time – hey, that’s 12 million artists. That doesn’t seem like a figure that could feasibly exist back in the day. Even accounting for all the contextual factors (amateurs releasing one song as a test and then dumping their account, scammers deliberately flooding the platform with junk, the ongoing accumulation of artists who’ve retired but who collect royalties on their work), there’s still so much out there. So many people are able to make and distribute their art.

Really, all these things are happening at the same time. We are seeing an explosion of access for the average person – truly staggering numbers of amateur or self-taught writers, film-makers and musicians – just as we’re seeing the big companies increasingly consolidate under a few massive corporations. It’s both grassroots and Google, indies and Amazon. These changes coexist. They’re not equally balanced, in terms of their impact or scale – the multi-billion dollar corporations have a much greater footprint than Cheryl down the road and her whale music – but that increased access also makes normal people more aware of how inaccessible a career in the arts truly is. We can all make music and put it on Spotify. We can do it, but we know we’ll probably only make 4c a month – and that’s sort of disheartening. We all have the opportunity, but it’s not much of an opportunity.

The problem is that the increase in access doesn’t correspond to an increase in audience. It corresponds to a flooded market, a fractured audience, increasingly marginal income for artists, and a sense that corporations are the only ones making bank. In fact, in our darker moments, it almost feels like the invitation to make art is a trick played on us by the corporations hosting the platforms by which that art might be distributed. The promise of Spotify was the promise of a gold rush – direct access and promotion for artists, audience reach like never before. But if the gold rush has been overhyped – if there’s not actually enough gold to go round – then the only people making bank are the ones selling the shovels. The suspicion is that Spotify is really just Facebook or YouTube – a platform that everyone uses where the content is generated by the audience, and where the most important metric is user retention. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good: it just matters that everyone’s there. Under this model the platform developers are freed of the costs of creating material, and they can just sit around collecting hosting fees, or selling user data to advertisers or whatever else. Lowering the barrier for the audience to create is also part of the model: it’s how the platform ensures a steady stream of content from their audience-creators. The invitation to make art, in this model, is a carrot to entice free labour from artists who would otherwise need to be hired as employees. For the audience, actually making art is falling into the trap. It’s generating content for the machine, trading present labour for the hope of financial compensation in the future. Doing it because you believe in art is almost a form of cringe. It’s buying into the marketing pitch, internalising the rationale that the company uses to offload responsibility for creative labour: art for art’s sake. It’s the Uber model, the gig economy. They didn’t ask you to make art. They didn’t contract you to do it. They just have this platform – and if you happen to make any art, just of your own accord, you’re welcome to upload it and share it with the world, and if enough people like it, you can even get a cut of the profits. What profits? Don’t worry about that.

Throughout all of this, the underlying suspicion is that art and artists are just grist in the mill. They fuel the machine, they keep the wheels spinning, but they are ultimately treated as subordinate entities. They’re just content. They matter less as art than in their economic function as user retention. They only matter as long as platforms are able to make money off them. That’s the foundation for some of the concerns about AI – in essence, platforms strip-mining stuff off the internet to train up their language models, which they then sell back to audience-creators. It’s not clear how these platforms distinguished between material that was publicly available and material that’s in the public domain, for instance under a Creative Commons license. My work here is all publicly available, but it’s still protected by copyright. It’s protected from the moment of creation – that’s how copyright works. You can read it for free, but you don’t have permission to copy it, modify it, reproduce it, or grab it all and throw it into your massive plagiarism machine. You don’t have permission to adapt my work, or reuse it in a commercial context. Publicly available is not the same as public domain. It’s not clear whether these AI companies respect that distinction. In essence, AI embodies the same basic problems accelerated to a staggering degree. It’s more access and less opportunity. It used to be that anyone could set up a WordPress account or self-publish their books on Amazon. Anyone could do it, but you still had to write the actual words. Now, ChatGPT can write for you. The bar for entry is even lower. The opportunity for access is even greater. Spam and junk will continue to flood the internet, at higher rates than ever before, and opportunities for actual artists will continue to fracture and shrink. It was hard to get paid for this stuff before: it’s about to get harder. We’re digging ourselves into a hole, and the only people who benefit are the dickheads selling the shovels.