The Creative Class Isn’t Dead Yet

Ever since Napster came along in 1999, we’ve been hearing reports of the death of the music industry. It seemed like only a matter of time until the digital revolution of file-sharing wrecked the livelihoods of musicians, authors, filmmakers, and everyone else doing creative work.

In a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, journalist Steven Johnsonlooked at the data on earnings and consumer behavior to figure out what happened to the culture industry over the last 15 years or so. His bottom line: the sky really isn’t falling.

Kurt Andersen: Looking at the data, how are musicians and other artists doing?

Steven Johnson: These numbers aren’t suggesting a completely rosy, utopian scenario. The money is coming from different sources — there has been a dramatic drop in the prices people are willing to pay for recorded music. But there was this extraordinary increase in the price people were willing to pay for seeing live music. All the technological forces that made it easy to pirate and illegally distribute copies of songs have made it easier to record and distribute an album.

What about authors of books, filmmakers, and TV?

The publishing industry is doing nicely; the movie world is doing fine in terms of revenues. We assumed once the Kindle and other digital readers were introduced that print copies of books would fade away and everything was going to go digital. That didn’t happen. There’s still a very healthy market for hardcover and paperback books.

We all know artists who are having a harder time making a living, but you say the data tell a different story?

The problem with case studies is that they’re just individual anecdotes, and you can always pull up other anecdotes that contradict them. What I wanted to do, purely from a data point of view, was to look at the fate of individual creators themselves.