An Important Open Letter to You About Lena Dunham

Tod Kelly in reply to Tod Kelly says:

@saul I think this is a complicated question but I think part of my respect for artists is that artists deserve to be paid.

Of course they do. And free advertising and PR, as I said, has value.

And despite what every artist I’ve ever known thinks, this isn’t a business decision unique to artists.

When we were getting my division off the ground, we not only worked for no charge for a number number of clients, we lost money — a lot of money — on them on purpose. To be honest, we had to. No one else was really doing what we were at the time, and it was hard to convince people who didn’t do what we did for a living that there was value in what we did. It worked out, because we were abel to turn almost all of those free gigs into paying ones. But we might have just as easily has gotten nothing back, lost our shirts, and gone bankrupt.

In fact, most businesses that start off giving their services away for free as a way to drum up interest go under pretty quickly. But that doesn’t make their decision to attempt that strategy that any less valid, nor does it mean that if they hadn’t done anything for free they would have survived.

I am also skeptical about whether Lena Dunham’s book tour is going to be the same amount of publicity or exposure as This American Life.

Oh, it absolutely won’t — and it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point.

If a business thinks they can get enough value in return for doing something pro bono, they will generally do it. Sometimes that might mean a million potential new clients, and sometimes it means only a handful, and sometimes it means only one. That gets to be that business’s decision, not yours.

I know most about the theatre world and as far as I can tell working for free might just end up being a self-locking cycle. Plenty of young actors, writers, and directors self-produce, work for free, in order to gain experience and have a resume that they can give to agents/managers. I’ve heard too many stories about actors who were told “No agent is going to work with you unless you get experience” and then the actor goes out and works for free and gets experience/credits. Then said actor is told by an agent “I can’t work do anything for you because of all this unpaid credits at no-name theatres, self-produced one-person shows, and in student films.” The same goes for playwrights who self-produce their own work usually.

Again, this isn’t something that is limited to artists. A lot of businesses start off by undercharging (even up to the point of giving it away for free), and then find no one wants their service once they raise the cost to break even. A lot (more than you’d guess, actually) start off undercharging, and never find out if people would pay more because they never feel comfortable asking, and go out of business. But that doesn’t mean that those people shouldn’t get to decide whether or not they want to try to drum new clients up in that fashion.

Take music, because it’s something I’m more familiar with than acting: My understanding is that if you include live ticket receipts (bars, pubs, and weddings as well as sold out amphitheaters) as well as recorded music, the music industry today produces something close to $25 billion annually in consumer revenue in the US and Europe. That’s a lot of people paying a lot of money for people to make music. So even though there are starving musicians out there, there is still a huge paying market — in fact, it’s five times larger than it was when I was playing professionally, which was before the big switch fro analog to digital really took place.

Now, that doesn’t mean that most people that play music won’t see much if any of that coin. They won’t — and despite what you whippersnappers think, they never did. There’s never been a time in modern history when people who decided to try making their fortune (or even a decent living) playing music didn’t know getting into it that it was a huge long shot. But people still do it.

And a lot of those people think their work is so good that, if people could only hear them, people would be willing to give them enough money to make a decent living (or a fortune). Yes, there have been, are and always will be musicians that have been proven right using this tactic, but the vast majority are wrong about that. Always have been, always will be.

And again, even though you think of artists as being different in this regard, they aren’t. The vast majority of the businesses that start 2014 will lose money in 2014. (Actually, over 30% will pay the business fee with their city or state and never have a single sale before they bag it.) And of those 2014 new businesses that don’t lose money this year, most will be out of business before the end of 2016. It’s sad, but that’s just the way it is. Just because you have a dream you believe in doesn’t mean that people want to buy it, whether your’e an artist, an attorney, an insurance salesperson or a drywaller.

And so the question, then, is who gets to decide whether my friend Mike’s band Mexican Gunfight should play a free gig they think might help them make more money in the long run? Mike and his bandmates? You? People on twitter who have never or will never pay money to see them play?

That’s the fork where you and I diverge.Report