Oddbean

Quality, authentic, original human artistic expression is always in demand. It has always been in demand, and it will continue to be in demand even beyond the age of AI. The internet today calls it “content.” It is how we seek to encapsulate and communicate ideas more richly, and it comes in various forms including written, audio, and visual. Anyone who creates content in any form knows that it is time consuming and costly to create and produce good content, especially to do so consistently. However, because of digital distribution methods, once released that content that was so costly to create is suddenly infinitely RE-producible with perfect fidelity for very little cost. The conundrum for artists/creators is that even though the demand for their work exists, and even though that work is costly to create, each final product they produce is infinite in supply as soon as they release it in digital form. Infinity has no value. Starting with the presumption that demand exists for art, and that it is reasonable for an artist to want to afford things like food, housing, and clothes, how do you make the work of creating content economically sustainable for those creating it? We find value in scarcity, and the scarce resources in the equation of content creation are ultimately the time, talent, and skill of the person doing the creating. People often want what a particular artist can produce. Perhaps it’s the artist’s skill, style, and precision; or perhaps it’s the artist’s particular interpretation and personality they find valuable. The skill, time, and talent/personality employed to create artistic expressions are valuable, and their supply cannot be easily reproduced/replicated even though the individual manifestations of them (the works of art) can be. This is, ultimately, what creators must figure out how to monetize if they are to make their work economically sustainable. So how much is an artist’s skill worth? How much is their time or their talent worth? How do you put a price tag on personality? Probably nobody, especially the artist, can really answer that objectively. However, with #value4value the consumers of an artist’s content can subjectively and individually decide for themselves how much it is worth to them. Nostr and Bitcoin give creators of every type of content the opportunity to directly own and control the distribution and monetization of their time, skill, and talent, more so than any other service or platform on the Internet. The #value4value approach to monetizing that content allows consumers to immediately have access to a creator’s work, and to individually place a subjective value on what it provides to them. The approach allows artists to focus on the work of creating art and building a reputation and relationship with their audience instead of worrying about how to control access to their work. And by using Nostr and Bitcoin, this approach allows artists to be free of the arbitrary rules and manipulation they face on other corporate ad-driven platforms. If you are a digital content creator, I think #value4value is worth giving a chance. The alternatives are increasingly less promising.