Take a brief look around any media,
and you will see a common factor: A lot of creative content. You will see
creativity on a scale never before seen.
Take a look around jobs in creative media, and you will see that
for every creative person there’s a logistics trail of accountants, sales,
management, hangers-on, and non-producers. Many of these guys make more in a
month than the actual content producers make in a decade.
If you’re a farmer, you can honestly
say that you grow your own money. You get paid at market rates, such as they
are. If you’re a shelf stacker, you get a wage, for a given amount of time and
effort.
Both contribute to their industries
and are “rewarded” for their products.
Creative media’s a bit different. The
product is the industry. Nobody watches TV to see great
accountancy. Hollywood isn’t based on management science. Never has been, you
could never get budgets like that if it was. They live or die on products. Most
of what needs doing is done by some poor bastard with a cash register and
another saint with a spreadsheet.
In a few cases, the product has
outgrown the industries. The most disgusting industry on Earth, the music
industry, doesn’t even need to exist any more, because its logistics are
obsolete. The book publishing industry, Tree Killers Extraordinaire, thrives on
a procedural process for an anachronism that sites like lulu can put together
in literal seconds. PDF has removed the need for a lot of overheads in creating
books.
If someone would kindly note that
e-book readers have been around for years, and that people like me can do a lot
more with them than with some defenceless bit of cellulose, it’d make life a
lot easier for most artists, musicians and writers.
Nor do publishers and recording contracts make life a lot easier. In both cases, you usually get lost in the inventory, unless very lucky, or unless one of the little jerks has condescended to do his job for once. Even Random House, one of the less offensive publishers, expects you to define the market for your work. So they can make a living off our products, but we can’t, while we do the work for them. Most actual payments are chicken feed, for very unfussy, probably anorexic, chickens.
Everybody who doesn’t produce
content gets paid. The janitor gets paid, the garbage guys get paid, but not
the people who make the products. Very like outworkers, if you make a $100
shirt, you get paid about 40c per shirt. Compared to the rate for writers,
outworkers are doing pretty well, and they don’t have to work 24/7/365.
Ironically, the world’s legendary airhead
industry pays creative people better than most, because fashion designs are
always in demand, and you can actually self-start and self manage. Over time,
your returns will be better, mainly because you’re doing your own business and
handling your own product. That’s not the case in media, where a collection of
arthropods in suits actively restricts production and reduces available outlets.
Say you’ve got 20 new media products.
Two will be under actual consideration. The others are just wasting their time,
because they don’t have the budget to buy more than two. The suits now own what
happens to those two products. The very large number of failed TV productions
is a good indication of how efficient that is. The other 90% of actual product
gets lost in the machinery.
Thanks to 80s management science,
networking is the only way anything ever happens in media. Other industries are
a lot more competitive, so the tendency is to go with product that sells, not
what your intoxicated, probably diseased, and almost certainly illiterate, little
friend found in a bar one night.
That doesn’t make life any easier for
those who produce actual material. Many of the “people” are things you wouldn’t
want to find in a toilet, let alone have as business associates. Networking leaves
a lot to be desired. Another serious issue is that nothing is done for
free in networks, or, perish the thought, as a way of earning a living by doing
what you’re paid to do. It’s pure graft.
The solution is, as usual, get rid of
the middlemen. It’s always worked in any sort of industry where people buy
anything. Instead of hiring cheap labor to make media product, it’d be a lot
more cost effective to just get rid of the parasites.
Production of creative media is now
cheaper than ever. The costs, however, have done nothing but rise. People cost
more than the real value of production. To some extent that’s a result of networking,
and jobs for the social clubs, but it’s also a result of sheer stupidity.
Anyone, in production of any sort of media, knows their own costs. What’s sold
is a severe markup, or in budget terms, produced below budget. Instant
profit is made by production out of the difference. If you have a budget of a
million dollars, you produce under that amount, and just charge on budget, or
if you’re feeling unusually altruistic, a bit below. Only real idiots, or
incredibly trusting people, get caught by surprise by production costs.
Add a hierarchy of useless clowns
being paid to be obstructive, and mess around with material, sometimes for
years, and is it any wonder that costs are so high? Why are the people who
create the products valued so much lower than those who seem to exist for no
other reason than to add costs?
No product = no sales = no industry.
Even charities, in war zones, can keep their administration budgets to around 8%.
Not media.
Everything apparently has to
cost millions. Maybe it’s an ego thing. Maybe it looks good on a CV that you
can manage, or pretend to manage, a budget that size. What it does not do, and
never will do, is guarantee sales. Even the most mindless marketer will admit
that not everything is a best seller. The most obtuse buyer of media product
will also, eventually, confess that not everything bought, sells.
If you want products, encourage the
creators of products, by not wasting their time, not insulting their
intelligence, and paying them properly.
Because one day someone will wake up
to that situation, and that person will have their pick of products.