SUPPLY OF ‘PROFESSIONAL’ AND USER-GENERATED CONTENT ON THE INTERNET
One of the major consequences of Internet usage has been the outpouring of words, sounds and images on websites and on social networking sites. Some of this content is supplied by ‘professionals’ with the intention of eventual financial reward.
Much content is also supplied by ‘amateurs’ or end users without pecuniary incentives, and related buzzwords are user-generated content and prosumption. Of course, a distinction between amateurs and professionals is difficult to make with any precision but there is some mileage in it. In cultural economics, research on artists’ labor markets distinguishes between professional and amateur creators according to several criteria: payment for their work; use, performance or exhibition of their work; or the proportion of working time spent on creating. This research on artists’ labor markets does provide a useful framework for research on content supply via the Internet.For professional artists, the Internet has opened up the opportunity to promote their careers and to interact with their audiences or fans more extensively. In some (likely few) cases, the creation of their work has taken place interactively with potential consumers, which may make success on the market more likely. Casting shows illustrate the promise as well as the apparent limitations of the procedure.
For both established artists and those trying to break into the arts professionally, the Internet has enabled them to advertise their work and to sell it directly to consumers without the presence of an intermediary, such as a record label, publisher or art gallery. However, no systematic research has yet been done on whether disintermediation is a sustainable model for generating income. Traditionally, intermediary firms provide upfront finance for the creation of works, promotion and distribution. If digital ICT decreases development and marketing costs, this may enable artists to more easily go it alone.
However, there may still be economies of scale in promotion and distribution of creative works. What is more, the evidence on artists’ labor markets in general has shown that the success of both works and careers is subject to radical uncertainty. Markets for creative works on the Internet will probably remain volatile and uncertain. Intermediaries may then have a function in taking on market risks, as they can spread their investments over a larger repertoire of works than individual creators can.Intermediaries also act as certifiers, selecting the artists whose work they deem to be marketable (or culturally significant in the case of non-profit promoters), thus restricting and guiding consumer choice of works and creators. The Internet has undoubtedly increased the output of accessible and diverse material. What proportion of it has a substantial value is not known, however. Again, intermediaries may have an important role to play in helping to generate positive attention for creators, and in providing some orientation to consumers.
Unauthorized use may undermine pecuniary rewards to creators. The extent of the problem is hard to gauge. Moreover, the transmission mechanism from pecuniary rewards and the quality and quantity of supply has hardly been assessed empirically. Rights holders may adapt their business models to unauthorized, digital copying by selling more excludable complements to digital copies (as discussed above in the context of multi-sided markets). A radical solution is crowdfunding, where the production of a creative work is subject to the provision of up-front finance from private individuals. It is an open question whether any of this can sustain pecuniary incentives to create in the presence of digital copying.
Furthermore, there is extensive evidence for non-pecuniary incentives to create. Amateur production of material on the Internet - which brings about so-called usergenerated content - documents this well. Some of that material may later take on monetary value and be paid for.
What is more, user-generated content often impinges on professional output, through mash-ups, collages and other such alteration of original works. This invokes the older question whether parody and other transformative uses of creative works, such as appropriation art, harm the creator of the original (Landes, 2000; Favale et al., 2013). What is more, even if a user-generated work embodies unauthorized use of the work of others, it enjoys protection within the scope of copyright law. Then user-generated content via the Internet can create a confusion of rights that are often anyway unenforceable. Overall, it is tricky to establish whether we gain more from unrestricted user-generated content, than we lose from any adverse consequences for professional suppliers. At this point, there is little documentation as to whether ‘amateur’ content drives out ‘professional’ content at all; a study by Erickson et al. (2013) suggests it does not. Even ignoring the ambiguity of these terms, these are challenging questions for empirical research. Nevertheless, it is something that cultural economics should try to tackle. All this suggests that there is considerable scope here to extend research on artists’ labor markets to investigate the impact of digitization on creators’ working practices and productivity and on any displacement of labor by the Internet.7.8