Great article, I've been tracking tech employment changes but had no idea it was this bad in the arts.
A nitpick: if you're talking about the "average across all industries" for AI use, shouldn't you use this series (currently at 42%) instead of one that includes personal use?
I would be interested to see a breakdown of the numbers in the sports industry.
Many large college athletics departments are adding Creatives (videographers, photographers, graphic designers) to meet the new demands of NIL. Others are cutting Creatives in order to outsource (Cal is an example). Smaller colleges are slimming their Creative staffs to deal with budget shortfalls from falling enrollment.
In turn, there’s a huge influx of freelancers caused by the lowered barrier to entry as cameras become cheaper and better.
A record number of new companies formed in the USA this year. The death of Hollywood and music industry giants is welcomed by everyone and anyone being able to create with AI assistants. The renaissance II is coming 🤘🏼
Musician's have never made as much money as the companies involved have. We have always had to perform live to actually have income. However now that the gravy train is off the rails the situation is much starker.
I’m so curious what ‘new Hollywood’ or the next generation of art and media will look like. Will we continue the trendline of brainrot and shortform ? Where can it even go from here?
I don’t get how AI, not Tiktok is to blame here. How does AI actually cause job loses in entertainment? Maybe AI Slop is crowding out human-made content, but I’m skeptical
Very good summary of where things stand. In animation the losses are more the result of consolidation of media into the hands of fewer owners ,but there is still a huge effect from AI expectations. Many projects are delayed on the general theory that in six months or a year the same volume of work will be done by Hal the number of people. It is the expectations that are far and away the biggest drivers here not current AI workflows.
"Creative" is doing a lot of work here, and, the term is sliding into "art" as if we are losing "artists". A lot of what is termed here "the creative class" are people who had technical skills, people who were not more creative that a programmer or a home builder or a skilled machine operator. Simultaneous with this "losing 100's of 1000's of jobs ..." story is that we are gaining 100's of 1000's of people who have made creativity part of their lives now: people who make some music, some art, some video, write fan fiction, write self-published novels, etc. If we're lucky, the gatekeeping apparatus of the arts and grants world will be dismantled.
I don’t think creativity is going anywhere. The tools may change, and some of the jobs certainly will, but people will still want something that comes from another human being—a story they actually lived, an emotion they actually felt, a point of view shaped by experience. AI can help us create, but I still believe there’s something different about hearing a person say, “This happened to me, and this is what it meant.”
It’s really encouraging to see that the share of consumer spending on concert tickets has grown to 2.5 times what it was in 1990. Definitely a point against the pervasive pessimistic narrative that young adults these days aren’t going out with friends anymore.
Whether the growth in consumer spending on concert tickets is encouraging depends on (1) what your goals are and (2) what is driving the increased spending, doesn't it?
For example, if my goal is for young adults to go out with friends often, and the increased spending on concert tickets comes primarily from higher ticket prices (that far surpasses the general rate of inflation), then I would not view this as encouraging: Higher ticket prices may price young adults with modest incomes out of many live-concert experiences, or grant them one concert ticket (read, experience with friends) for the same (inflation-adjusted) price that would have yielded multiple concert experiences in years past.
This short article [1] claims that the average price in 2024 US dollars for "Top 100 Tours" events went from about $52 in 1996 to about $136 in 2024. The ratio, 2.6, is consistent with the hypothesis that increased spending on concert tickets from the 1990s to today comes entirely from higher ticket prices.
There are surely other sources that dig into this question more deeply. To focus on the goal of having young adults go out with friends, it may be clearer to look for data on the number of tickets sold (and, ideally, to what age groups and income demographics) or self-reported data on how young adults spend their time and money.
To actively promote your goal, we can also plan outings and host events that encourage our friends to get together :)
From where we sit, building digital products, we're seeing a similar shift on the tech side. The work isn't disappearing, it's moving up a level: less time making the thing, more time deciding what's worth making and why.
Creative-class displacement may show up first as a wage and hiring story rather than a sudden vanishing of output. If AI compresses junior creative work while senior editorial judgment stays scarce, the labor market split could matter more than the cultural panic framing.
Unfortunately, the BEA book sales numbers are contradicted by the industry's own accounting of sales through the Association of American Publishers (AAP). I tally the numbers myslef, though I can't find an online source to link to. Sales, as measured by the AAP, are essentially flat for the last two decades.
Digital arts are shedding jobs while in person entertainment still grows music survived the internet because it had live shows. Hollywood doesn't. But BookTok rescued books in a way nobody predicted.
"US Book Sales Have Rebounded to Record Highs": it looks like this is a chart in nominal USD, have you looked at it adjusted for inflation? A casual glance suggests that between 2005-present there was a dip and then return to trend (that is, mostly flat overall).
Great article, I've been tracking tech employment changes but had no idea it was this bad in the arts.
A nitpick: if you're talking about the "average across all industries" for AI use, shouldn't you use this series (currently at 42%) instead of one that includes personal use?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPSGENAIUSAGESHAREWORK
Sorry *45%*
I would be interested to see a breakdown of the numbers in the sports industry.
Many large college athletics departments are adding Creatives (videographers, photographers, graphic designers) to meet the new demands of NIL. Others are cutting Creatives in order to outsource (Cal is an example). Smaller colleges are slimming their Creative staffs to deal with budget shortfalls from falling enrollment.
In turn, there’s a huge influx of freelancers caused by the lowered barrier to entry as cameras become cheaper and better.
A record number of new companies formed in the USA this year. The death of Hollywood and music industry giants is welcomed by everyone and anyone being able to create with AI assistants. The renaissance II is coming 🤘🏼
Musician's have never made as much money as the companies involved have. We have always had to perform live to actually have income. However now that the gravy train is off the rails the situation is much starker.
I’m so curious what ‘new Hollywood’ or the next generation of art and media will look like. Will we continue the trendline of brainrot and shortform ? Where can it even go from here?
I don’t get how AI, not Tiktok is to blame here. How does AI actually cause job loses in entertainment? Maybe AI Slop is crowding out human-made content, but I’m skeptical
Very good summary of where things stand. In animation the losses are more the result of consolidation of media into the hands of fewer owners ,but there is still a huge effect from AI expectations. Many projects are delayed on the general theory that in six months or a year the same volume of work will be done by Hal the number of people. It is the expectations that are far and away the biggest drivers here not current AI workflows.
"Creative" is doing a lot of work here, and, the term is sliding into "art" as if we are losing "artists". A lot of what is termed here "the creative class" are people who had technical skills, people who were not more creative that a programmer or a home builder or a skilled machine operator. Simultaneous with this "losing 100's of 1000's of jobs ..." story is that we are gaining 100's of 1000's of people who have made creativity part of their lives now: people who make some music, some art, some video, write fan fiction, write self-published novels, etc. If we're lucky, the gatekeeping apparatus of the arts and grants world will be dismantled.
I don’t think creativity is going anywhere. The tools may change, and some of the jobs certainly will, but people will still want something that comes from another human being—a story they actually lived, an emotion they actually felt, a point of view shaped by experience. AI can help us create, but I still believe there’s something different about hearing a person say, “This happened to me, and this is what it meant.”
It’s really encouraging to see that the share of consumer spending on concert tickets has grown to 2.5 times what it was in 1990. Definitely a point against the pervasive pessimistic narrative that young adults these days aren’t going out with friends anymore.
Whether the growth in consumer spending on concert tickets is encouraging depends on (1) what your goals are and (2) what is driving the increased spending, doesn't it?
For example, if my goal is for young adults to go out with friends often, and the increased spending on concert tickets comes primarily from higher ticket prices (that far surpasses the general rate of inflation), then I would not view this as encouraging: Higher ticket prices may price young adults with modest incomes out of many live-concert experiences, or grant them one concert ticket (read, experience with friends) for the same (inflation-adjusted) price that would have yielded multiple concert experiences in years past.
This short article [1] claims that the average price in 2024 US dollars for "Top 100 Tours" events went from about $52 in 1996 to about $136 in 2024. The ratio, 2.6, is consistent with the hypothesis that increased spending on concert tickets from the 1990s to today comes entirely from higher ticket prices.
There are surely other sources that dig into this question more deeply. To focus on the goal of having young adults go out with friends, it may be clearer to look for data on the number of tickets sold (and, ideally, to what age groups and income demographics) or self-reported data on how young adults spend their time and money.
To actively promote your goal, we can also plan outings and host events that encourage our friends to get together :)
[1] https://omarafra.com/concert-ticket-price-tracker
From where we sit, building digital products, we're seeing a similar shift on the tech side. The work isn't disappearing, it's moving up a level: less time making the thing, more time deciding what's worth making and why.
Creative-class displacement may show up first as a wage and hiring story rather than a sudden vanishing of output. If AI compresses junior creative work while senior editorial judgment stays scarce, the labor market split could matter more than the cultural panic framing.
Unfortunately, the BEA book sales numbers are contradicted by the industry's own accounting of sales through the Association of American Publishers (AAP). I tally the numbers myslef, though I can't find an online source to link to. Sales, as measured by the AAP, are essentially flat for the last two decades.
Digital arts are shedding jobs while in person entertainment still grows music survived the internet because it had live shows. Hollywood doesn't. But BookTok rescued books in a way nobody predicted.
So live theater will make a comeback?
"US Book Sales Have Rebounded to Record Highs": it looks like this is a chart in nominal USD, have you looked at it adjusted for inflation? A casual glance suggests that between 2005-present there was a dip and then return to trend (that is, mostly flat overall).