the creator economy, a special edition
Feature: Fixing the economics of being a creator
Chris Dixon
We should be living in a golden age for creators: Now, more than ever, technologies like the internet, media hosting sites, streaming platforms, social media, and mobile phones have democratized access to, and engagement with, creators. Yet it’s still not possible for most creators to make a healthy living off their work today.
While tech platforms have helped us discover and connect with more artists than ever — including more independent artists — creators are still dependent on just a few tech companies that have all the power and make all the decisions for them. Even though these companies depend entirely on the people who use their platforms and applications, they don’t share much control, ownership, or rewards with those people.
Big creators may be fine, but small and medium-sized creators don’t thrive. The question is how to return control where it belongs: back in the hands of creators, and fans. A future defined by blockchains would put power back into the hands of creators and users. Blockchains mean ownership… and ownership means independence.
Resource: Creators using blockchain technology to unlock new possibilities
This week, we introduced Voices Onchain — highlighting creators who have turned to blockchain technology to unlock new creative possibilities, build deeper connections with fans, and discover more ways to monetize their work.
Check out the inaugural group of creators at the link below: Explore their stories, and help nominate (see form on site) other artists/ creators to feature who are also working onchain.
see also:
On “Art, authenticity, and anarchy” — FEWOCiOUS first started creating art at 13. After selling his first painting at 17, he then continued making and selling art through a series of successful NFT drops including hosting an auction with Christie’s and more.
On “A Creator's journey to self-sovereignty: ‘The Why Is in the Who’” — Latashá is a music artist, worldbuilder, and emerging tech enthusiast. She is the founder of TOPIA (a web3 media label focused on onboarding and highlighting independent artists to the forefront of blockchains); and was also formerly head of community at NFT company ZORA. A singer-songwriter, rapper, producer, and performance artist, Latashá voices and uses technology from NFTs to midi controllers.
On “Art and awe in the age of machine intelligence” — Refik Anadol, internationally renowned media artist (and visiting researcher & lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts) made history last year when one of his artworks was acquired by MoMA -- marking the institution's first inclusion of a tokenized artwork in its permanent collection. Anadol’s NFT designs span data block sculptures to quantum computing to a space metaverse (in collaboration with NASA JPL).
On “Storytelling a creator's journey: 'Pleased 2 Meet U'” — Emily Yang aka pplpleasr is a multidisciplinary artist and co-founder of decentralized content studio Shibuya. Her journey went from visual effects — with credits in feature films like Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman, Star Trek Beyond, as well as commercials and game cinematics — to defining “the look” of the DeFi movement, and creating Fortune magazine’s first NFT cover.
From the archives: Creators, creativity, and technology; community-owned characters; more
On the Power of Community-Owned Characters and Decentralized Media
by Cuy Sheffield (2021)
Every day we consume popular entertainment centered on characters. A collection of successful characters can become the foundation for a franchise (like a Star Wars, Marvel, or Harry Potter) that can span decades, and be incorporated into successful products across platforms and media types.
Yet most successful characters exist as intellectual property owned by a single corporation. This means that fans don’t have any governance, let alone direct ownership, of these characters — limiting them to being only passive consumers of the products and narratives that the corporation decides to create.
Today, blockchain/ crypto technologies enable a new model of character development and ownership that could not only unbundle creative media — but also lower the barrier to entry for online communities to bring new characters into the world. These technologies also create characters that are more fully representative of the communities that support them.
On creators, creativity, and technology
with Bob Iger (2022)
This intimate chat with Disney CEO Bob Iger discusses the interplay between technology, content, and distribution. The conversation covers the journey of various creators, especially as the industry has evolved: from TV and cable to the advent of the internet/ web 1.0; to web 2.0 and distribution models like streaming and to business models like advertising; to web3 and emerging technologies like VR and AR.
The podcast also touches on related top-of-mind topics like IP, decentralization, remote work, and more. And touches on other themes top of mind for company (and community) builders of all sizes: from the innovator’s dilemma and whether to build vs. buy, to managing creatives, and much more.
related:
On the art of technology, and the technology of art
with Simon Denny & Sonal Chokshi
We know that technology has changed art, and that artists have evolved with every new technology; it’s a tale as old as humanity, moving from cave paintings to computers. Underlying these movements are endless debates around invention versus remix and commercialism versus art, to outsider art versus canon and how art reaches new audiences.
On this episode of the web3 with a16z podcast, Berlin-based contemporary artist Simon Denny discusses how artists experimented with the emergence of new technology platforms like the web browser, iPhone, and social media; how generative art found its “native” medium on blockchains, and why NFTs; whether we’re in a global monoculture online; and much more.
How NFT royalties work: Designs, challenges, and new ideas
by Michael Blau, Scott Duke Kominers, and Daren Matsuoka
Automatically enforced royalties on secondary sales have always been an important value proposition for NFTs. In an ideal world, creators could set royalties onchain that would be paid automatically whenever their work is sold anywhere on the internet, without relying on marketplaces and other third parties to honor royalties out of goodwill.
However, the demand for enforced onchain royalties outpaced progress toward making them a reality. The challenge is that it’s difficult to distinguish between the NFT transfers that are sales that should pay a royalty, and other types of transfers (such as self-transfers between a user’s own wallets, sending an NFT as a gift, etc.). Newer royalty designs attempt to address this challenge by identifying different types of transfers and enforcing royalties when appropriate — but these mechanisms come with a significant tradeoff between strict royalty enforcement (guaranteed royalty payments) and composability (how much an NFT can interact with other applications onchain).
So this post discusses the pros and cons of existing NFT royalty designs, and how they balance between enforcing royalties and enabling composability. The authors introduce two new approaches to NFT royalties that leverage incentive mechanisms to drive market participants to respect royalties — the goal is not to advocate for a particular approach, but to help builders consider different NFT royalty designs and associated tradeoffs.
the creative act: software as art
-- a16z crypto editorial team
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