How artists can (finally) get paid in the digital age

It's been a weird 100 years for artists and creators, says musician and entrepreneur Jack Conte. The traditional ways we've turned art into money (like record sales) have been broken by the internet, leaving musicians, writers and artists wondering how to make a living. With Patreon, Conte has created a way for artists on the internet to get paid by their fans. Could payment platforms like this change what it means to be an artist in the digital age?

Hi everyone.

So, I'm going to take us back to 2007.

I'd just spent about six months
working on album

that I'd poured my heart and my soul into,

and it was getting about three plays
per day on Myspace at the time,

and I was getting more and more depressed
when I started noticing these other people

who were playing guitar and singing

and putting videos
on this new site called YouTube,

and they were getting 300,000 views.

So I decided I'm going to start
making some Youtube videos.

And one day they featured
a video of my band on the homepage,

which was amazing --
we got a bunch of new fans.

We also got a bunch of people

who, I guess, just didn't really like
the music or something --

(Laughter)

It's OK because people
started coming to our shows,

and we started touring,

and we came out with a record.

And when I checked
our bank account balance

after our first monthly iTunes payout,

we had 22,000 bucks in it,

which was amazing because at the time
I was living at my dad's house,

trying to make a living as a musician
by uploading videos to the internet

which literally zero people
respected in 2009 --

even the people who were
uploading videos to the internet.

And so for the next four years,

I uploaded more and more
videos to the Internet,

and they got better and better,

and we made enough money
through brand deals

and commercials and iTunes sales

to buy a house.

And we built a recording studio.

But there was one big problem:

making money as a creative person
in 2013 was super weird.

First of all, the business models
were changing all the time.

So our 58,000 dollars
of annual iTunes download income

was about to be replaced by about
6,000 dollars of streaming income.

Steams paid less than downloads.

And then as more and more creators
started popping up online,

there was just more competition
for these five-figure brand deals

that had kept the band afloat for years.

And to top it all off,
our videos themselves --

the creative stuff that we made
that our fans loved and appreciated --

that were actually
contributing value to the world,

those videos were generating
almost zero dollars of income for us.

This is an actual snapshot
of my YouTube dashboard

from a 28-day period

that shows one million views

and 166 dollars of ad earnings
for those views.

The whole machine in 2013

that took art online and outputted money

was totally nonfunctional.

It doesn't matter if you're a newspaper,

or an institution,

or an independent creator.

A monthly web comic
with 20,000 monthly readers --

20,000 monthly readers --

gets paid a couple hundred
bucks in ad revenue.

This is 20,000 people.

Like, in what world is this not enough?

I don't understand.

What systems have we built
where this is insufficient

for a person to make a living?

So, I actually have a theory about this.

I think it's been a weird 100 years.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

About 100 years ago,

humans figured out how to record
sound onto a wax cylinder.

That was the beginning of the phonograph.

Right around the same time,

we figured out how to record
light onto a piece of photographic paper,

celluloid -- the beginning
of film and television.

For the first time,
you could store art on a thing,

which was amazing.

Art used to be completely ephemeral,

so if you missed the symphony,
you just didn't get to hear the orchestra.

But now, for the first time,

you could store the orchestra's
performance on a physical object,

and like, listen to it later,

which was amazing.

It was so amazing in fact,

that for the next 100 years,
between 1900 and 2000,

humans built just billions and billions
of dollars of infrastructure

to essentially help artists do two things.

First, put their art on a thing,

and second, get that thing
around the world

to the people who wanted the art.

So, so much industry
is devoted to these two problems.

Oh my gosh, there are trucking companies,

and brick-and-mortar and marketing firms,
and CD jewel case manufacturers,

all devoted to these two problems.

And then we all know what happened.

10 years ago, the internet matures

and we get Spotify
and Facebook and YouTube

and iTunes and Google search,

and a hundred years of infrastructure

and supply chains and distribution systems

and monetization schemes

are completely bypassed --

in a decade.

After 100 years of designing these things,

it's no wonder that it's just totally
broken for creative people right now.

It's no wonder that the monetization
part of the chain doesn't work

given this new context.

But what gets me super excited
to be a creator right now,

to be alive today and be
a creative person right now,

is realizing that we're only 10 years
into figuring out this new machine --

to figuring out the next 100 years
of infrastructure for our creators.

And you can tell we're only 10 years in.

There's a lot of trial and error,
some really good ideas forming,

a lot of experimentation.

We're figuring out
what works and what doesn't.

Like Twitch streamers.
Who's heard of Twitch?

Twitch streamers are making
three to five thousand bucks a month

streaming gaming content.

The big ones are making
over 100,000 dollars a year.

There's a site called YouNow,

it's an app.

It allows musicians and vloggers
to get paid in digital goods from fans.

So, I'm also working on the problem.

Four years ago I started
a company called Patreon

with a friend of mine.

We're 80 people now
working on this problem.

It's basically a membership platform

that makes it really easy
for creators to get paid --

every month from their fans
to earn a living.

For a creator, it's like having a salary
for being a creative person.

And this is one of our creators.

They're called "Kinda Funny."

They have about 220,000
subscribers on YouTube.

And when they upload a video,

it gets somewhere around
15,000 views to 100,000 views.

I want you to check yourselves right now.

I think when we hear numbers like that,
when we hear "15,000 views,"

and we see content like this,

we just snap categorize it
as being not as legitimate

as a morning show
that you'd hear on the radio

or a talk show that you'd
see on NBC or something

But when "Kinda Funny"
launched on Patreon,

within a few weeks, they were
making 31,000 dollars per month

for this show.

It took off so fast that they decided
to expand their programming

and add new shows,

and now they launched
a second Patreon page --

they're making an additional
21,000 dollars per month.

And they're scaling what's essentially
becoming a media company,

financing the whole thing
through membership.

OK, here's another example.

This is Derek Bodner,

a sports journalist who used
to write for Philadelphia Magazine

until a few months ago when
the magazine cut out all sports coverage.

Now he writes articles
and publishes them on his own website --

he's still covering sports,
but for himself.

And he's making 4,800 bucks
a month from 1,700 patrons,

financing it through membership.

This is Crash Course --

free educational content for the world.

This show is actually
on the PBS digital network --

29,000 dollars per month.

This is a duo sailing around the world,

getting paid every month
for documenting their travels

from 1,400 patrons.

This is a podcast,
"Chapo Trap House", making --

actually, since I screenshotted this,

they're making an additional
2,000 dollars per month,

so they're now making 56,000 dollars
per month for their podcast.

And Patreon's not the only one
working on the problem.

Even Google's starting to work on this.

A couple years ago,
they launched Fan Funding;

more recently, they launched Super Chat

as a way for creators
to monetize live streaming.

Newspapers are starting
to experiment with membership.

New York Times has a membership program;

The Guardian has over 200,000
paying subscribers

to its membership program.

There's this bubbling soup
of ideas and experiments

and progress right now,

and it's pointing in the direction
of getting creators paid.

And it's working.

It's not, like, perfect yet,

but it's really working.

So, Patreon has over 50,000 creators
on the platform making salaries --

getting paid every month
for putting art online,

for being a creative person.

The next hundred years
of infrastructure is on the way

and it's going to be different
this time because of this --

because of the direct connection
between the person who makes the thing

and the person who likes the thing.

About seven or eight years ago,

I went to a cocktail party.

This is when the band
had hit our first machine,

so things were really cranking.

We had just made
about 400,000 dollars in one year

through iTunes sales
and brand deals and stuff like that.

And this guy comes up to me and says,

"Hey, Jack, what do you do?"

I said, "I'm a musician."

And he just sobered up immediately,

and he stuck out his hand,

put a hand on my shoulder,

and in a real earnest,
very nice voice he was like,

"I hope you make it someday."

(Laughter)

And ...

I have so many moments like that
logged in my memory.

I just cringe thinking of that.

It's so embarrassing to just
not feel valued as a creative person.

But as a species,

we are leaving that cocktail party behind.

We're leaving that culture,

we're out of there.

We're going to get so good
at paying creators,

within 10 years,

kids graduating high school and college
are going to think of being a creator

as just being an option --

I could be a doctor, I could be a lawyer,

I could be a podcaster,
I could have a web comic.

It's just going to be
something you can do.

We're figuring it out.

It's going to be a viable and sustainable
and respected profession.

Creators are going to come out
the other end of this weird 100 years,

this century-long journey,

with an awesome new machine.

And they're going to be paid,
and they're going to be valued.

Thanks, everybody.

(Applause)

I think it went pretty well.

I want artists who saw that
to not give up --

to know that we're getting there.

It's not there yet,

but in a couple years,

there will be so many systems
and tools for them

to just make a living online,

and if they've got a podcast
that's starting to take off,

but they're not able
to make money on it yet,

that's happening

and they're going to be paid.

It's happening.