I've been to the year 2000...
Not much has changed but we live underwater. Oh, and clever comic artists think that micropayments are going to save the arts.
I was chatting on one of the new social media platforms we’ve had to adopt while the hyperwealth manbabies run around in their poopy space-nappies and burn our comms networks to the ground, and the subject came up of Micropayments. I got a burst of future-nostalgia about the digital utopia for the creative arts that was promised when online non-physical distribution exploded.
I recalled dimly a proposal from the turn of the millennium – which at the time seemed thrilling, but also ridiculous and naive – that soon creators would be able to connect direct to audiences, and build a living by sending their art (music, films, books, comics, journalism) over the internet. They’d reach unimaginably big audiences thanks to internet word of mouth. And they’d be paid small amounts per song, per comedy sketch, per page. Fractions of a penny per sale to a fan, reflecting the now minimal manufacturing and distribution cost of the work. Micropayments meant getting art was cheaper for fans, but because non-physical distribution would be frictionless and unlimited, enough of them would add up to a decent living for the creators.
The difference between 2000 and now has been on my mind because I’m putting an album out this month, the first time my band Candidate has released anything in almost that long, so I’m feeling the difference that a decade-and-a-half of tech change can make if you’re putting out an indie record.
And it turns out that… nothing has changed at all. We’re planning to make the record pay for itself by… er… making heavy physical copies, on vinyl and CD, putting them onto merchandise tables, and into envelopes, and record shops, and selling them to fans in the opposite way to how we expected we would do in the atom-light digital future. As any multi million selling artist who’s shared their $500 Spotify statement will confirm, there is no non-physical alternative that offers an artist a living, or even a return on their investment of time.
It feels like we’re the Sealed Knot, re-enacting how a small band in the 1990s might have done it. I like it as a vibe (the record is informed by our teenage love of this musical era) but it’s undeniably strange, the music biz equivalent of insisting on riding to work on a penny farthing, or upcycling battered bits of tin into fake 1950s diner signs. No wonder people associate vinyl with try-hard hipsters. Releasing a record is a sort of cargo cult now. You’re repeating a vintage ritual in the hope of reaping a scrap of the rich harvests described by your ancestors.
And it wasn’t meant to be this way.
The model that all creatives had hoped for was the one I first heard from Stewart Lee, quoting John Hegley. “Gather a thousand fans, and persuade them to buy £20 worth of your stuff every year each, and you have the basis of a living.” And that kind of works still, providing you have a side hustle or a day job of some sort (and who outside the creative arts’ top 1% doesn’t?)
It reminded me of reading a book in 2000 that promised that finding that £20 x 1000 fans model was about to get easier, because of the internet. The book is Reinventing Comics, by graphic storytelling guru Scott McCloud. It’s the second of his superb series of illustrated essays on comic art.
The first volume Understanding Comics is hands-down the best book I’ve ever read about art and pop culture (it blew my head clean off, I quote it all the time, and it’s a big influence on my new book on comedy, at least in its approach to taking “dumb” culture very seriously indeed). If you’ve not got a copy, I insist you get hold of one. I’ll use this as a place to advertise Scott’s books, as a way of making up for what I’m about to do, which is post up a few choice chunks of his second volume, on the then-coming digital revolution, for you to read here.
Here’s how McCloud describes how some obvious-to-us but brand-new-to-him 2000-era technology (computer, scanner, internet connection) might change the life of someone who draws cartoons:
Facing a turn-of-the-millennium comics market that was tightly controlled by big corporate publishers, and where independent creators might struggle to sell their work and make a living, Scott McCloud then explained how this could all be changed with one technological breakthrough: micropayments.
Read this and – as I did – weep. Because though McCloud was talking speculatively, about tech and cultural change that hadn’t yet happened back in 2000, we have every bit of this technology now. And we didn’t do any of this. And that’s why we are where we are.
What’s ironic is that for a brief while, independent creators did have a way to connect with potentially large audiences, via social networks like Twitter. But those networks are shackled to old corporate thinking, seeking funding via advertising revenue, by promising to drive eyes toward your ad if you pay them. So if you’re a small creator, and you’re not paying the social media company directly for an ad, it’s in their interest to disincentivise your audience from finding you, and you from trying to reach an audience. Otherwise, what the hell are they selling to their bigger advertising clients, if you’re just posting a direct link to your comic or record or article, for free?
Even more ironic, the man who just bought Twitter – and who by all accounts is running it into the ground, killing one of the best ways to connect with customers and build that dream creative marketplace – was the same man whose investment in PayPal (when he merged his x.com bank with Confinity) allowed us to have precisely the flexible digital banking system that we might use for Scott McCloud’s fantasy micropayment idea.
It took a while. Before 2010, micropayments were still a fantasy – the costs didn’t make sub-penny payments economically viable. That was the barrier. The banks said they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) handle tiny payments of the sort that might, in Scott McCloud’s utopia, make the independent creative arts sector work.
But PayPal was one of the companies that cracked it. When you prove online that you’re the owner of your bank account by typing in a code from your bank statement that was sent there by, say, PayPal or Apple, they do that by dropping 0.01p in your bank account. That’s exactly the sort of micropayment that was impossible to implement back in the day. PayPal, Apple, Amazon… all now have the data handling capacity to gather micropayments and distribute them. It was a cartoonist’s pipe dream in 2000. It’s totally doable now.
But that leap forward in digital banking came too late, long after the big corporations had scrambled to save their industries from everything-is-free-now digital piracy. They didn’t do it by per-unit micropayment sales to artists, because the public had been told that films and music and books were worth £0.00 each, and had enjoyed that heady rush of unlimited access. Pricing content even at the lowest feasible payment level for digital purchase (79p a song, as iTunes tried) was a hard sell. So they agreed with the pirate price and made the unit cost of art £0.00.
They made up for that shortfall using subscriptions, selling ad space, developing big media brands, increasing share price, attracting venture capital… none of which was artist focused, or to do with fans buying stuff they enjoyed from people they liked. It was just about making sure that any money that fans did want to spend on ‘content’ went to the same people it had done before: big corporations. And not the artists direct. Certainly not to the small, quirky, independent ones with small fanbases like Scott McCloud wanted to save with these new ‘micropayments’.
And what did we give up when we decided that we’d let this tech revolution benefit the same old big branded companies, rather than revolutionise the daily lives of independent creators by chucking them 10p every time they made a fan happy? A chance to change the system and make it work better for humans in general. Look. Here’s Scott again. dreaming like billy-o back in 2000. You could make… anything! Nobody could stop you!
But there’s no incentive to make that change now, even though the tech is there. A digital model of distribution and payment that would potentially support a healthy ecosystem of small creators directly accessing their fans, and vice versa, has gone back to exactly how it always was, all the old middlemen in place. It’s just that instead of fans taking a ten pound note and going to the Virgin Megastore to buy what they like there, they turn on a virtual tap on a laptop and get hosed down with all of human culture at once, for roughly the same price, direct debited from their bank account as a monthly subscription. So it feels… kind of good anyway. So who cares?
The fans have been told that the way to access content is through those big branded middlemen, the Spotify / Netflix / Amazon model. Artistic content’s unit cost reduced to practically zero, whether it’s a TV show, a blockbuster movie, or a favourite album.
The important thing is that attractive fan-friendly content can be advertised as available on their platform, not that the suppliers get properly paid, or rewarded when their work reached unexpected numbers of fans. Remember that Squid Game was a buy-out. (That’s what the US writers’ strike was about, despite the press’ fascination with robot scripts and digital actors).
Even though all Scott McCloud’s impossible-seeming digital technology arrived bang on time – high speed internet, digital compression, micropayments – the will to make a new creative dynamic between creators and fans didn’t. Because small creators are… small. They don’t have the power to demand it, or create that landscape themselves. They got pushed aside, even as the utopian digital solutions were introduced that were meant to make earning a living as an artist in the 21st Century a glorious possibility for millions of us.
The industries have survived. The gatekeepers remain.
And the only place most creators see micropayments is on our Spotify statements.