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I’ll be at Chevalier’s Books in LA’s Larchmont Village neighborhood tonight, with the writers Lynell George, David Ulin and Joe Donnelly of the literary magazine Slake.
Be there or be square.
I’ll also be at the LA Times Festival of Books on Sunday April 19.
Thank you for speaking at the book fair about your new book. I asked at the end about ads. Could I ask it one more time?
I feel you on the role ads play now. They are the way to get real cash in the arts. No doubt.
What I want to know is: can we cut out the ad man and give real cash to the arts through means such as NEA or, here in LA, the DCA?
What I heard you say was that the NEA has no real cash now. That is where I start from. We are on the same page on that.
What I am getting at is this: ads are paid for by all of us, since ads are not taxed. One in a while, some one says, “Let’s tax ads!” I am not saying that. I am saying, let’s tax ads and then give the cash (which is real cash…I guess it was $40 billion in 2014) to the NEA, the DCA, and so on.
You feel me?
What is your sense of how such a deal would hit the ones you know and love in the arts and so on?
Warm Regards,
Noah Bray-Ali, PhD (My day job is quantum physics)
Hey your question was more intelligent and complex than we had time for!
Let me think on this more fully. I probably don’t have to tell you that anything that looks like a tax increase is met by kicking and screaming on the right and accusations that one is messing with “the free market.”
Dear Scott,
I recently read the chapter in Culture Crash about indie bands. The chances of a songwriter or performer of original material making a living has always been very slim. I wonder if things are significantly worse then they have ever been.
I know hard data on content creators’ income is hard to come by, but one approach might be to look at the royalties paid out by PRO’s. Certainly every songwriter who is the least bit serious about making a living is member of ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. $11/hr. is generally considered a living wage. Since songwriters are essentially self employed they incur expenses so let’s say a living wage for a songwriter is $13/hr. . Adjusting for inflation a year by year or decade by decade comparison could be made of the percentage of PRO members who earned a living from their royalties. There are probably other ways of getting at these kinds of statistics.
Certainly issues like piracy should be addressed, but if the percentage of creators earning a living has not decreased significantly, say 3-4%, then it seems to me the real question is; “Why have content creators always had it so bad and what can be done about it?