ARTICLE: Sorry, ladies, there really is a man shortage By Reed Tucker BY NEW YORK POST

Sorry, ladies, there really is a man shortage

By Reed Tucker


It’s not your fault. It’s the ratio.

To all the young, college-educated women out there who feel like Donald Trump will probably become president before they find a decent, eligible man, take comfort.

According to author Jon Birger, you’re not imagining things. In “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” out today, Birger, a former writer for Fortune and Money magazines, crunched demographic, census and other data to show that it really is historically rough out there for the ladies.


After noticing that his single gal pals were always complaining that “guys were ignoring them or were toying with them,” Birger decided to investigate. Based on his research, here are eight reasons why women can’t find a man — and strategies for increasing their odds.

You’re looking in Manhattan

The island is great for, say, watching a cheesy musical or spending $300 on a bottle of vodka. But for dating? Not so much.

“Because women have been graduating from college in 30-plus percent greater numbers than men for years, there are now four women for every three men nationally in the marriage-age, college-educated dating market,” Birger says.

In Manhattan, the numbers are even more dire, with 38 percent more young female college grads than male. Birger says the imbalance is also exacerbated by New York’s large population of gay males. Some 9 to 12 percent of men in Manhattan are gay, according to Gary Gates, a demographics expert at UCLA’s Williams Institute.

Other cities especially brutal for single women are Houston; Providence, RI; and Raleigh, NC. Better options include Silicon Valley, San Francisco, San Diego and Columbus, Ohio. The Bay Area, for example, attracts programmers, computer scientists and engineers — fields that are disproportionately male.

You went to the wrong college

The average gender ratio among US undergrads is now 57 percent women to 43 percent men. And some universities are even less of a sausage fest. At NYU it’s 61 to 39. At Boston University, 62 to 38.

“Facebook did a study a few years ago on how couples met, and it turned out that 25 percent met their significant others in college or grad school,” Birger says. “What was interesting is that the men who met their wives in college were not the ones who attended colleges that were disproportionately female. They attended colleges that were majority male.”

Want to increase your chances of getting hitched? Head to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (72 percent male) or Georgia Tech (66 percent), two institutions with way more guys than girls.

The men are playing you

“There’s a lot of social science showing that men behave differently in different relationship markets,” Birger says.

When faced with an oversupply of women, guys are more likely to delay marriage and play the field. Or, in other words, to act like guys.



And as reported by numerous publications, dating is out with young people and hookup culture is in. No need to wine and dine a potential mate when you can just swipe right. With the gender imbalance on college campuses, men are having a field day, and they may see no need to end their winning streak by settling down.

For women, however, the longer a girl settles for casual sex as opposed to a long-term relationship, the more chance she has of ending up alone.

You’re not issuing an ultimatum

“Ultimatums work in business and politics,” Birger says. “This notion that the only area of life you shouldn’t issue an ultimatum in is romance doesn’t make sense.”

Researcher John Molloy interviewed 3,000 couples right after they got their marriage licenses and found that 60 percent of the women were prepared to walk away if their guy suddenly declared he wasn’t ready.



You’re not making the first move

The aggressive women are the ones more likely to get the guy.

“I was talking about this with my rabbi, and he does premarital counseling,” Birger says. “Of the nine couples he had in counseling, seven of them shared a similar story: The guys all had several options, but they married the women who pursued them the most.”

And ladies, don’t worry about turning off guys by being too pushy.

“It’s a myth that men enjoy the chase,” Birger says.

You’re working in the wrong job

Slaving away in p.r., education, nursing, event planning or other female-dominant fields? Time to get a new job.

“Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld reports that 10 percent of Americans meet their future spouses at work,” Birger says.

Some careers to consider: mechanical engineering (93 percent male), computer network administration (83 percent) and financial advising (74 percent).

You’re too religious


Consider dating a nonbeliever, even if it makes your grandma cry into her meat sauce.

“People who leave organized religion are disproportionately male,” Birger says. “Atheists and agnostics are also disproportionately male. An atheist meet-up would be a really good place to meet men.”

You’re too picky

“For the women who wait [to settle down], the dating pool gets much, much worse,” Birger says.

He likens it to a game of musical chairs. In the first round, fresh into the dating market, nearly every woman gets a chair. By the final round, the chances of losing soar to 50 percent.

For example, some 20 years ago a recent college-grad female confronted a dating market that had 117 recent college-grad men for every 100 women. Today that same woman, now 40, if still unmarried, faces a market in which nearly two-thirds of those formerly single men are hitched, and there are just 33 eligible men for every 50 women — 52 percent more women than men.

“None of this would matter if we were open-minded about who we dated,” Birger says. “The problem is, Americans — both men and women — have become more rigid about dating across socioeconomic boundaries.”

To find a mate, college-educated women should consider dating working-class men.

“In the future, we’re going to see more of what I call ‘mixed collar’ marriages,” Birger says.

POETRY: THE ANTICIPATING SOUND OF SURRENDER

On the oceans of a lover's
       dream
I left you there . . .
Among Springtime's
      yearnings
          of another year --
Apart . . . but
I wept for your touch
         my love . . .

On the oceans of a lover's
       dream
We parted
    in stormy sullenness --
       Again
That destiny should have
  planned this fate
To see the
   angry oceans sweep
        away our footsteps
           
On the oceans of a lover's
       dream
Our different lives
    taking us away
Yet our paths crossed --
   Again, entwined
And from the beginning
          we knew --
Our lives were meant
              to be --
   Together


On the oceans of a lover's
       dream
Different worlds,
         different ways
Yet the difference --
      no meaning
For all the oceans
    and all our loneliness
Could not kill our love
Forever we are as one


On the oceans of a lover's
       dream
The difference is our
    destiny
And no oceans can
      drown us
Our love lives on
In the whispering
  kisses of the
    endless waves
Through all eternity
In the echoes . . .
   of a lover's dream.


part 2

your essence...
i quiver at your presence
i laugh at my mind
that tries to teach me lessons
i'm falling for you
can you hear my body calling you?

got me playing a game that has no reward
it makes me feel so good
i start to speak backwards
your name is always on the tip of my tongue
i want to scream to the top of my lungs
that i am in love with you.


infatuated, sometimes a little psychotic
yeah, some thoughts are even erotic
but they're not always bad
only when you look at me
with those seductive eyes
that have had me captured for so long
or when i hear another sad love song

your voice, your tone
if loving you is right
then i don't want to be wrong
i need you
like a leech, i feed off you

but it won't stop these words
from coming out of my pen
and when you're around me
my heart is warm
and i know that you'll always
give me love taps on the arm
so  if your reading this
you're the girl in my love poem.



part 3

You stole my heart,
From the first glance.
Are you kind enough,
To give me just one chance?

I'd make you happy;
You'd fall in love.
The one's from your past
Would all get the shove.

Soul mates from the beginning,
Soul mates till the end.
We'll love each other,
You'll be more than just a friend.

Our love will grow deeper,
With each passing day,
Desiring each other.
In more than one way.

So give me your heart,
I need it to believe
That with each passing day
Your love
I'd receive.



part 4

My love is like a river...
it is deep.  
My love is like a flower...
it's a beautiful blossom for you to reap.
My love is like the sunshine...
so visible and warm.
Like a shelter, a refuge,
my love protects you from the storm.
Yes, my love is like
so many other things.
But, most importantly,
my love is always with you;
no matter what life brings



part 5

Her essence rises and touches me softly
As her expression lures me inside her voice
Whispering of all the magical places untraveled
Guiding me to the paths of the unknown and unseen
She gazes down deep within the recesses of my soul
Taking hold gently as she embraces all of me with just a touch
Within the folds of my budding consciousness of her near me
She awakens the darkness and a surrounding light she unfolds
Her essence rises and entrances me entirely
With it she moves me like no other has ever done
For she has come to birth the very core of my being
Giving life to what once was hardened and gone
She comforts me in my moments of discouragement
Singing a song that soothes my heart and my mind
Words spoken with whispers of loving seen within her
Heartfelt voices of the longing she has shared from inside
Her essence rises and I know that she is the one
As I have never felt my world break away in so many ways
Releasing each single part of everything that I am
In return giving freely to building my world around her

Nothing could ever be felt as deep as this




part 6

Day to day, night to night, breath to breath,
My heart is starving for only one thing,
Which would be my sweet medicine,
And would cure me from my dreadful illness.

The last hope of a hopeless man,
Who's lips were thirsty for a kiss for so long,
Ears were "hungry" to hear the word "love,"
Soul and body cried for a soft touch.

I'm afraid of what I am feeling again,
Because my heart was broken so many times;
When a girl said, 'bye...' I felt I would die.

Your love gave me hope again,
But happiness and joy are not my guests;
I'm afraid to be happy... but I want to be.



part 7

The music of the sea,
And its swelling waves,
So mighty and strong,
Nothing can deny my love to you.

The wind blows
And the sun shines,
It's natures' daily routine for a day,
And mine is loving you.

I feel desolated whenever you're not with me.
For you are the only one I desire to be with,
And you only are the one that I
Want to spend the rest of my life with.

I'd rather be alone than without you.
Only you my heart desires,
And only you I yearn to be with,
My dear precious.

My love for you would only swell and never fade.
I promise you to love you with all my heart
if you give me just one chance



part 8


I see something special about you,
When I look into your eyes.
So sweet, so wonderful,
Something I can't describe.
You give me a love,
That I've never before felt.
With every look, with every touch
You make my heart melt.
There are no words, no thoughts
To describe how much you mean to me.
In all my hopes, in all my dreams
I hope this is meant to be.
'Cause I can't imagine my life without you,
And I hope you'll say
you feel the same way too.
I'm in love with you
I hope you see, and I hope
That this will always be.
because I care for you
More than ever.
I love you today, tomorrow,
Now and forever.



part 9

I sing to use the waiting,
To ease the pain of my soul,
And to gratify all needs,

And, one day, we'll tell each other how we sing,
And it will keep the darkness from entering,

I wait, until the day you approach,
And we sing; together,
Because every new beginning,
Comes from another beginning's end?




part 10

the day we met, is the the day the angels sighed &
said "PERFECT"
they put down thier arrows & love potion
they knew their work was done
they spent years, trying to find the
one for me
I s'pose they spent years on you as well
I s'pose they never thought that you & I would
make such a good us
they never saw it till...
till you walked into my life
I would like to believe they spent forever working
on us
I bet they knew the moment that our eyes met, that
I was your perfect match & you were mine
they knew it before either of us did, that you are the
love of my life, you are all I can't resist
I no longer need their love nor their
support
now their work is done, they can rest assured, that
you & I are a perfect match 'cause,
the day we met is the day the angels
sighed & said "PERFECT



part 11



Every time you smile, you blow my sadness away!
Every time your hands caress me, my body trembles!
Every time you whisper my name, I fly away!
Every time you breath, you set free the passion inside of me!

You're like the wind that drags and leaves
his marks on every site he goes!
You're the melody that sings inside of me every moment of my life!
You're the oxygen that I breath during my wildest dreams!
You're everything that I hoped to meet!

But when you're sad...
I want to be there to blow your sadness away!
When you cry...
I want to be the tears that grow in your eyes!
When you have a nightmare....
I want to be there to hug you during the night!
When you feel frightened...
I want to be at your side to fight against your fears!

And all this because I love you!



part 12


I'm waiting to be in your arms,
To feel the peace again.
I'm waiting to feel your eyes,
Feel them with mine,
Just waiting for the touch of your lips,
The taste of sweet perfectness,
Waiting for the grasp of your hand,
To know I have something to hold...
Just waiting for YOU!



part 13

Unimaginable to queens and doves
I was caught between soft gasps of delight
and the privileged serenity
of taking in your smile

That solicitous smile 
delivered hope to my soul
when soft swept words carried
dusk into nocturnal magic

Then a trickle of light nestled your hair
and I waited for the wind
and tiny bells to ring 
the anticipating sound of surrender

JOURNAL: I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ANYMORE

I’ve been dating for so long and going through the same motions, the same conversations, the same disappointments, the same coffee drinks, the same everything that I forgot what it was like to have fun. And frankly, to go after what I wanted. When I was young, I would have never put up with a woman who didn’t call me back or a someone who forgot something important in my life. I wouldn’t have settled for some mediocre date because I had endless hope and trust that I’d one day meet a pretty stellar woman, so why would I put up with a childish woman.? How is it, that I have I wasted so much time worrying when, how and where I was going to meet my partner instead of enjoying the ride? Why did I care if it didn’t work out with some girl. Instead of worrying if I was ‘running out of time’ or if I was ‘going to be alone forever’—I’ve stopped caring.  By letting go of the anxiety that’s been in my gut for the past decade, I’ve opened myself up to something healthier… peace. I feel free to explore, free of my own self-imposed deadlines on love, free to live life, spend money, take trips, go out or binge-watch… however and whenever I want. If that means meeting someone along the way, then great. If not, then I’ll just have to trust—like I did when I was younger—that it’ll work itself out.Now, just because I don’t care as much, doesn’t mean my intentions have changed. I still really (truly, madly, deeply) want to share my life with someone, and while I can’t make it happen, I also can’t worry about it. If it’s going to happen, it will. I can’t speed it up or slow it down or develop an ulcer in the process. And maybe more importantly—I have to (and want to) be happy in the meantime. I’ve never let any woman control my happiness level, so why am I allowing my imaginary future wife take the reigns on my dimples? I’m not. Because ya know what? I don’t give a care anymore. And it’s the best decision I’ve made about my dating life in a very, very long time.

ARTICLE:The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t By STEVEN JOHNSON NYTIMES

The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t

In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.

By STEVEN JOHNSONAUG. 19, 2015

n July 11, 2000, in one of the more unlikely moments in the history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orrin Hatch handed the microphone to Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, to hear his thoughts on art in the age of digital reproduction. Ulrich’s primary concern was a new online service called Napster, which had debuted a little more than a year before. As Ulrich explained in his statement, the band began investigating Napster after unreleased versions of one of their songs began playing on radio stations around the country. They discovered that their entire catalog of music was available there for free.


Ulrich’s trip to Washington coincided with a lawsuit that Metallica had just filed against Napster — a suit that would ultimately play a role in the company’s bankruptcy filing. But in retrospect, we can also see Ulrich’s appearance as an intellectual milestone of sorts, in that he articulated a critique of the Internet-­era creative economy that became increasingly commonplace over time. ‘‘We typically employ a record producer, recording engineers, programmers, assistants and, occasionally, other musicians,’’ Ulrich told the Senate committee. ‘‘We rent time for months at recording studios, which are owned by small-­business men who have risked their own capital to buy, maintain and constantly upgrade very expensive equipment and facilities. Our record releases are supported by hundreds of record companies’ employees and provide programming for numerous radio and television stations. ... It’s clear, then, that if music is free for downloading, the music industry is not viable. All the jobs I just talked about will be lost, and the diverse voices of the artists will disappear.’’

The intersection between commerce, technology and culture has long been a place of anxiety and foreboding. Marxist critics in the 1940s denounced the assembly-line approach to filmmaking that Hollywood had pioneered; in the ’60s, we feared the rise of television’s ‘‘vast wasteland’’; the ’80s demonized the record executives who were making money off violent rap lyrics and ‘‘Darling Nikki’’; in the ’90s, critics accused bookstore chains and Walmart of undermining the subtle curations of independent bookshops and record stores.


Six creatives in the Los Angeles area are supporting themselves with gigs that would have been impossible 15 years ago.

But starting with Ulrich’s testimony, a new complaint has taken center stage, one that flips those older objections on their heads. The problem with the culture industry is no longer its rapacious pursuit of consumer dollars. The problem with the culture industry is that it’s not profitable enough. Thanks to its legal troubles, Napster itself ended up being much less important as a business than as an omen, a preview of coming destructions. Its short, troubled life signaled a fundamental rearrangement in the way we discover, consume and (most importantly) pay for creative work. In the 15 years since, many artists and commentators have come to believe that Ulrich’s promised apocalypse is now upon us — that the digital economy, in which information not only wants to be free but for all practical purposes is free, ultimately means that ‘‘the diverse voices of the artists will disappear,’’ because musicians and writers and filmmakers can no longer make a living.

Take a look at your own media consumption, and you can most likely see the logic of the argument. Just calculate for a second how many things you used to pay for that now arrive free of charge: all those Spotify playlists that were once $15 CDs; the countless hours of YouTube videos your kids watch each week; online articles that once required a magazine subscription or a few bucks at the newsstand. And even when you do manage to pull out a credit card, the amounts are shrinking: $9 for an e-book that used to be a $20 hardcover. If the prices of traditional media keep falling, then it seems logical to critics that we will end up in a world in which no one has an economic incentive to follow creative passions. The thrust of this argument is simple and bleak: that the digital economy creates a kind of structural impossibility that art will make money in the future. The world of professional creativity, the critics fear, will soon be swallowed by the profusion of amateurs, or the collapse of prices in an age of infinite and instant reproduction will cheapen art so that no one will be able to quit their day jobs to make it — or both.

The trouble with this argument is that it has been based largely on anecdote, on depressing stories about moderately successful bands that are still sharing an apartment or filmmakers who can’t get their pictures made because they refuse to pander to a teenage sensibility. When we do see hard data about the state of the culture business, it usually tracks broad industry trends or the successes and failures of individual entertainment companies. That data isn’t entirely irrelevant, of course; it’s useful to know whether the music industry is making more or less money than it did before Ulrich delivered his anti-­Napster testimony. But ultimately, those statistics only hint at the most important question. The dystopian scenario, after all, isn’t about the death of the record business or Hollywood; it’s about the death of music or movies. As a society, what we most want to ensure is that the artists can prosper — not the record labels or studios or publishing conglomerates, but the writers, musicians, directors and actors themselves.

Their financial fate turns out to be much harder to measure, but I endeavored to try. Taking 1999 as my starting point — the year both Napster and Google took off — I plumbed as many data sources as I could to answer this one question: How is today’s creative class faring compared with its predecessor a decade and a half ago? The answer isn’t simple, and the data provides ammunition for conflicting points of view. It turns out that Ulrich was incontrovertibly correct on one point: Napster did pose a grave threat to the economic value that consumers placed on recorded music. And yet the creative apocalypse he warned of has failed to arrive. Writers, performers, directors and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved. Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever.

The closest data set we have to a bird’s-eye view of the culture industry can be found in the Occupational Employment Statistics, an enormous compendium of data assembled by the Labor Department that provides employment and income estimates. Broken down by general sector and by specific professions, the O.E.S. lets you see both the forest and the trees: You can track employment data for the Farming, Fishing and Forestry Occupations (Group 45-0000), or you can zoom in all the way to the Fallers (Group 45-4021) who are actually cutting down the trees. The O.E.S. data goes back to the 1980s, though some of the category definitions have changed over time. This, and the way the agency collects its data, can make specific year-to-year comparisons less reliable. The best approximation of the creative-class group as a whole is Group 27-0000, or Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media Occupations. It’s a broader definition than we’re looking for — I think we can all agree that professional athletes are doing just fine, thank you very much — but it gives us a place to start.


The first thing that jumps out at you, looking at Group 27-0000, is how stable it has been over the past decade and a half. In 1999, the national economy supported 1.5 million jobs in that category; by 2014, the number had grown to nearly 1.8 million. This means the creative class modestly outperformed the rest of the economy, making up 1.2 percent of the job market in 2001 compared with 1.3 percent in 2014. Annual income for Group 27-0000 grew by 40 percent, slightly more than the O.E.S. average of 38 percent. From that macro viewpoint, it hardly seems as though the creative economy is in dust-bowl territory. If anything, the market looks as if it is rewarding creative work, not undermining it, compared with the pre-­Napster era.

The problem with the O.E.S. data is that it doesn’t track self-­employed workers, who are obviously a large part of the world of creative production. For that section of the culture industry, the best data sources are the United States Economic Census, which is conducted every five years, and a firm called Economic Modeling Specialists International, which tracks detailed job numbers for self-­employed people in specific professions. If anything, the numbers from the self-­employed world are even more promising. From 2002 to 2012, the number of businesses that identify as or employ ‘‘independent artists, writers and performers’’ (which also includes some athletes) grew by almost 40 percent, while the total revenue generated by this group grew by 60 percent, far exceeding the rate of inflation.

What do these data sets have to tell us about musicians in particular? According to the O.E.S., in 1999 there were nearly 53,000 Americans who considered their primary occupation to be that of a musician, a music director or a composer; in 2014, more than 60,000 people were employed writing, singing or playing music. That’s a rise of 15 percent, compared with overall job-­market growth during that period of about 6 percent. The number of self-­employed musicians grew at an even faster rate: There were 45 percent more independent musicians in 2014 than in 2001. (Self-­employed writers, by contrast, grew by 20 percent over that period.)

Of course, Baudelaire would have filed his tax forms as self-­employed, too; that doesn’t mean he wasn’t also destitute. Could the surge in musicians be accompanied by a parallel expansion in the number of broke musicians? The income data suggests that this just isn’t true. According to the O.E.S., songwriters and music directors saw their average income rise by nearly 60 percent since 1999. The census version of the story, which includes self-­employed musicians, is less stellar: In 2012, musical groups and artists reported only 25 percent more in revenue than they did in 2002, which is basically treading water when you factor in inflation. And yet collectively, the figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-­Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves. Somehow the turbulence of the last 15 years seems to have created an economy in which more people than ever are writing and performing songs for a living.

How can this be? The record industry’s collapse is real and well documented. Even after Napster shut down in 2002, music piracy continued to grow: According to the Recording Industry Association of America, 30 billion songs were illegally downloaded from 2004 to 2009. American consumers paid for only 37 percent of the music they acquired in 2009. Artists report that royalties from streaming services like Spotify or Pandora are a tiny fraction of what they used to see from traditional album sales. The global music industry peaked just before Napster’s debut, during the heyday of CD sales, when it reaped what would amount today to almost $60 billion in revenue. Now the industry worldwide reports roughly $15 billion in revenue from recorded music, a financial Armageddon even if you consider that CDs are much more expensive to produce and distribute than digital tracks. With such a steep decline, how can the average songwriter or musician be doing better in the post-­Napster era? And why does there seem to be more musicians than ever?

Part of the answer is that the decline in recorded-­music revenue has been accompanied by an increase in revenues from live music. In 1999, when Britney Spears ruled the airwaves, the music business took in around $10 billion in live-­music revenue internationally; in 2014, live music generated almost $30 billion in revenue, according to data assembled from multiple sources by the live-music service Songkick. Starting in the early 1980s, average ticket prices for concerts closely followed the rise in overall consumer prices until the mid-1990s, when ticket prices suddenly took off: From 1997 to 2012, average ticket prices rose 150 percent, while consumer prices grew less than 100 percent. It’s elemental economics: As one good — recorded music — becomes ubiquitous, its price plummets, while another good that is by definition scarce (seeing a musician play a live performance) grows in value. Moreover, as file-­sharing and iTunes and Spotify have driven down the price of music, they have also made it far easier to envelop your life with a kind of permanent soundtrack, all of which drives awareness of the musicians and encourages fans to check them out in concert. Recorded music, then, becomes a kind of marketing expense for the main event of live shows.

It’s true that most of that live-­music revenue is captured by superstar acts like Taylor Swift or the Rolling Stones. In 1982, the musical 1-­percenters took in only 26 percent of the total revenues generated by live music; in 2003, they captured 56 percent of the market, with the top 5 percent of musicians capturing almost 90 percent of live revenues. But this winner-­takes-­all trend seems to have preceded the digital revolution; most 1-­percenters achieved their gains in the ’80s and early ’90s, as the concert business matured into a promotional machine oriented around marquee world tours. In the post-­Napster era, there seems to have been a swing back in a more egalitarian direction. According to one source, the top 100 tours of 2000 captured 90 percent of all revenue, while today the top 100 capture only 43 percent.

The growth of live music isn’t great news for the Brian Wilsons of the world, artists who would prefer to cloister themselves in the studio, endlessly tinkering with the recording process in pursuit of a masterpiece. The new economics of the post-­Napster era are certainly skewed toward artists who like to perform in public. But we should remember one other factor here that is often forgotten. The same technological forces that have driven down the price of recorded music have had a similar effect on the cost of making an album in the first place. We easily forget how expensive it was to produce and distribute albums in the pre-­Napster era. In a 2014 keynote speech at an Australian music conference, the indie producer and musician Steve Albini observed: ‘‘When I started playing in bands in the ’70s and ’80s, most bands went through their entire life cycle without so much as a note of their music ever being recorded.’’ Today, musicians can have software that emulates the sound of Abbey Road Studios on their laptops for a few thousand dollars. Distributing music around the world — a process that once required an immense global corporation or complex regional distribution deals — can now be performed by the artist herself while sitting in a Starbucks, simply through the act of uploading a file.

The vast machinery of promoters and shippers and manufacturers and A&R executives that sprouted in the middle of the 20th century, fueled by the profits of those high-­margin vinyl records and CDs, has largely withered away. What remains is a more direct relationship between the musicians and their fans. That new relationship has its own demands: the constant touring and self-­promotion, the Kickstarter campaigns that have raised $153 million dollars to date for music-­related projects, the drudgery that inevitably accompanies a life without handlers. But the economic trends suggest that the benefits are outweighing the costs. More people are choosing to make a career as a musician or a songwriter than they did in the glory days of Tower Records.

Of the big four creative industries (music, television, movies and books), music turns out to be the business that has seen the most conspicuous turmoil: None of the other three has seen anywhere near the cratering of recorded-­music revenues. The O.E.S. numbers show that writers and actors each saw their income increase by about 50 percent, well above the national average. According to the Association of American Publishers, total revenues in the fiction and nonfiction book industry were up 17 percent from 2008 to 2014, following the introduction of the Kindle in late 2007. Global television revenues have been projected to grow by 24 percent from 2012 to 2017. For actors and directors and screenwriters, the explosion of long-form television narratives has created a huge number of job opportunities. (Economic Modeling Specialists International reports that the number of self-­employed actors has grown by 45 percent since 2001.) If you were a television actor looking for work on a multiseason drama or comedy in 2001, there were only a handful of potential employers: the big four networks and HBO and Showtime. Today there are Netflix, Amazon, AMC, Syfy, FX and many others.

What about the economics of quality? Perhaps there are more musicians than ever, and the writers have collectively gotten a raise, but if the market is only rewarding bubble-­gum pop and ‘‘50 Shades Of Grey’’ sequels, there’s a problem. I think we can take it as a given that television is exempt from this concern: Shows like ‘‘Game Of Thrones,’’ ‘‘Orange Is The New Black,’’ ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ and so on confirm that we are living through a golden age of TV narrative. But are the other forms thriving artistically to the same degree?

Look at Hollywood, and at first blush the picture is deeply depressing. More than half of the highest grossing movies of 2014 were either superhero films or sequels; it’s clearly much harder to make a major-­studio movie today that doesn’t involve vampires, wizards or Marvel characters. This has led a number of commentators and filmmakers to publish eulogies for the classic midbudget picture. ‘‘Back in the 1980s and 1990s,’’ Jason Bailey wrote on Flavorwire, ‘‘it was possible to finance — either independently or via the studio system — midbudget films (anywhere from $5 million to $60 million) with an adult sensibility. But slowly, quietly, over roughly the decade and a half since the turn of the century, the paradigm shifted.’’ Movies like ‘‘Blue Velvet,’’ ‘‘Do the Right Thing’’ or ‘‘Pulp Fiction’’ that succeeded two or three decades ago, the story goes, would have had a much harder time in the current climate. Steven Soderbergh apparently felt so strongly about the shifting environment that he abandoned theatrical moviemaking altogether last year.

Is Bailey’s criticism really correct? If you make a great midbudget film in 2015, is the marketplace less likely to reward your efforts than it was 15 years ago? And has it become harder to make such a film? Cinematic quality is obviously more difficult to measure than profits or employment levels, but we can attempt an estimate of artistic achievement through the Rotten Tomatoes rankings, which aggregate critics’ reviews for movies. Based on my analysis, using data on box-­office receipts and budgets from IMDB, I looked at films from 1999 and 2013 that met three categories. First, they were original creations or adaptations, not based on existing franchises, and were intended largely for an adult audience; second, they had a budget below $80 million; and third, they were highly praised by the critics, as defined by their Rotten Tomatoes score — in other words, the best of the cinematic midlist. In 1999, the most highly rated films in these categories combined included ‘‘Three Kings,’’ ‘‘Being John Malkovich,’’ ‘‘American Beauty’’ and ‘‘Election.’’ The 2013 list included ‘‘12 Years a Slave,’’ ‘‘Her,’’ ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty,’’ ‘‘American Hustle’’ and ‘‘Nebraska.’’ In adjusted dollars, the class of 1999 brought in roughly $430 million at the box office. But the 2013 group took in about $20 million more. True, individual years can be misleading: All it takes is one monster hit to skew the numbers. But if you look at the blended average over a three-year window, there is still no evidence of decline. The 30 most highly rated midbudget films of 1999 to 2001 took in $1.5 billion at the domestic box office, adjusted for inflation; the class of 2011 to 2013 took in the exact same amount. Then as now, if you make a small or midsize movie that rates on the Top 10 lists of most critics, you’ll average roughly $50 million at the box office.

The critics are right that big Hollywood studios have abandoned the production of artistically challenging films, part of a broader trend since the 1990s of producing fewer films over all. (From 2006 to 2011, the combined output of major Hollywood studios declined by 25 percent.) And yet the total number of pictures released in the United States — nearly 600 in 2011 — remains high. A recent entertainment research report, The Sky Is Rising, notes that most of that growth has come from independent production companies, often financed by wealthy individuals from outside the traditional studio system. ‘‘Her,’’ ‘‘12 Years a Slave,’’ ‘‘Dallas Buyers Club,’’ ‘‘American Hustle’’ and ‘‘The Wolf of Wall Street’’ were all funded by major indies, though they usually relied on distribution deals with Hollywood studios. At the same time, of course, some of the slack in adventurous filmmaking has been taken up by the television networks. If Francis Ford Coppola were making his ‘‘Godfather’’ trilogy today, he might well end up at HBO or AMC, with a hundred hours of narrative at his disposal, instead of 10.



How have high-­quality books fared in the digital economy? If you write an exceptional novel or biography today, are you more or less likely to hit the best-­seller list than you might have in the pre-­Kindle age? Here the pessimists might have a case, based on my analysis. Every year, editors at The New York Times Book Review select the 100 notable books of the year. In 2004 and 2005, the years before the first Kindles were released, those books spent a combined 2,781 weeks on The Times’s best-­seller list and the American Booksellers Association’s IndieBound list, which tracks sales in independent bookstores. In 2013 and 2014, the notable books spent 2,531 weeks on the best-­seller lists — a decline of 9 percent. When you look at the two lists separately, the story becomes more complicated still. The critical successes of 2013 and 2014 actually spent 6 percent more weeks on the A.B.A. list, but 30 percent fewer weeks on the broader Times list. The numbers seem to suggest that the market for books may be evolving into two distinct systems. Critically successful works seem to be finding their audience more easily among indie-­bookstore shoppers, even as the mainstream market has been trending toward a winner-­takes-­all sweepstakes.



This would be even more troubling if independent bookstores — traditional champions of the literary novel and thoughtful nonfiction — were on life support. But contrary to all expectations, these stores have been thriving. After hitting a low in 2007, decimated not only by the Internet but also by the rise of big-box chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble, indie bookstores have been growing at a steady clip, with their number up 35 percent (from 1,651 in 2009 to 2,227 in 2015); by many reports, 2014 was their most financially successful year in recent memory. Indie bookstores account for only about 10 percent of overall book sales, but they have a vastly disproportionate impact on the sale of the creative midlist books that are so vital to the health of the culture.

How do we explain the evolutionary niche that indie bookstores seem to have found in recent years? It may be as simple as the tactile appeal of books and bookstores themselves. After several years of huge growth, e-book sales have plateaued over the past two years at 25 to 30 percent of the market, telegraphing that a healthy consumer appetite for print remains. To many of us, buying music in physical form is now simply an inconvenience: schlepping those CDs home and burning them and downloading the tracks to our mobile devices. But many of the most ardent Kindle converts — and I count myself among them — still enjoy browsing shelves of physical books, picking them up and sitting back on the couch with them. The trend might also reflect the social dimension of book culture: If you’re looking for literary community, you head out to the weekly reading series at the indie bookstore and buy something while you’re there. (Arguably, it’s the same phenomenon that happened with music, only with a twist. If you’re looking for musical community, you don’t go out on a CD-­buying binge. You go to a show instead.)

All these numbers, of course, only hint at whether our digital economy rewards quality. Or — even better than that milquetoast word ‘‘quality’’ — at whether it rewards experimentation, boundary-­pushing, satire, the real drivers of new creative work. It could be that our smartphone distractions and Kardashian celebrity culture have slowly but steadily lowered our critical standards, the aesthetic version of inflation: The critics might like certain films and books today because they’re surrounded by such a vast wasteland of mediocrity, but if you had released them 15 years ago, they would have paled beside the masterpieces of that era. But if you scan the titles, it is hard to see an obvious decline. A marketplace that rewarded ‘‘American Beauty,’’ ‘‘The Corrections’’ or ‘‘In the Heart of the Sea’’ doesn’t seem glaringly more sophisticated than one that rewards ‘‘12 Years a Slave,’’ ‘‘The Flamethrowers’’ or ‘‘The Sixth Extinction.’’

If you believe the data, then one question remains. Why have the more pessimistic predictions not come to pass? One incontrovertible reason is that — contrary to the justifiable fears of a decade ago — people will still pay for creative works. The Napsterization of culture turned out to be less of a threat to prices than it initially appeared. Consumers spend less for recorded music, but more for live. Most American households pay for television content, a revenue stream that for all practical purposes didn’t exist 40 years ago. Average movie-­ticket prices continue to rise. For interesting reasons, book piracy hasn’t taken off the way it did with music. And a whole new creative industry — video games — has arisen to become as lucrative as Hollywood. American households in 2013 spent 4.9 percent of their income on entertainment, the exact same percentage they spent in 2000.

At the same time, there are now more ways to buy creative work, thanks to the proliferation of content-­delivery platforms. Practically every device consumers own is tempting them at all hours with new films or songs or shows to purchase. Virtually no one bought anything on their computer just 20 years ago; the idea of using a phone to buy and read a 700-page book about a blind girl in occupied France would have sounded like a joke even 10 years ago. But today, our phones sell us every form of media imaginable; our TVs charge us for video-­on-­demand products; our car stereos urge us to sign up for SiriusXM.

And just as there are more avenues for consumers to pay for creative work, there are more ways to be compensated for making that work. Think of that signature flourish of 2000s-­era television artistry: the exquisitely curated (and usually obscure) song that signals the transition from final shot to the rolling credits. Having a track featured during the credits of ‘‘Girls’’ or ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ or ‘‘True Blood’’ can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a songwriter. (Before that point, the idea of licensing a popular song for the credits of a television series was almost unheard-­of.) Video-­game budgets pay for actors, composers, writers and song licenses. There are YouTube videos generating ad revenue and Amazon Kindle Singles earning royalties, not to mention those emerging studios (like Netflix and Yahoo) that are spending significant dollars on high-­quality video. Filmmakers alone have raised more than $290 million on Kickstarter for their creations. Musicians are supplementing their income with instrument lessons on YouTube. All of these outlets are potential sources of revenue for the creative class, and all of them are creatures of the post-­Napster era. The Future of Music Coalition recently published a list of all the revenue streams available to musicians today, everything from sheet-­music sales at concerts to vinyl-­album sales. They came up with 46 distinct sources, 13 of which — including YouTube partner revenue and ringtone royalties — were nonexistent 15 years ago, and six of which, including film and television licensing, have greatly expanded in the digital age.


The biggest change of all, perhaps, is the ease with which art can be made and distributed. The cost of consuming culture may have declined, though not as much as we feared. But the cost of producing it has dropped far more drastically. Authors are writing and publishing novels to a global audience without ever requiring the service of a printing press or an international distributor. For indie filmmakers, a helicopter aerial shot that could cost tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago can now be filmed with a GoPro and a drone for under $1,000; some directors are shooting entire HD-­quality films on their iPhones. Apple’s editing software, Final Cut Pro X, costs $299 and has been used to edit Oscar-­winning films. A musician running software from Native Instruments can recreate, with astonishing fidelity, the sound of a Steinway grand piano played in a Vienna concert hall, or hundreds of different guitar-­amplifier sounds, or the Mellotron proto-­synthesizer that the Beatles used on ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’’ These sounds could have cost millions to assemble 15 years ago; today, you can have all of them for a few thousand dollars.

From the bird’s-­eye perspective, it may not look as though all that much has changed in terms of the livelihoods of the creative class. On the whole, creators seem to be making slightly more money, while growing in number at a steady but not fast pace. I suspect the profound change lies at the boundaries of professionalism. It has never been easier to start making money from creative work, for your passion to undertake that critical leap from pure hobby to part-time income source. Write a novel or record an album, and you can get it online and available for purchase right away, without persuading an editor or an A&R executive that your work is commercially viable. From the consumer’s perspective, blurring the boundaries has an obvious benefit: It widens the pool of potential talent. But it also has an important social merit. Widening the pool means that more people are earning income by doing what they love.

These new careers — collaborating on an indie-­movie soundtrack with a musician across the Atlantic, uploading a music video to YouTube that you shot yourself on a smartphone — require a kind of entrepreneurial energy that some creators may lack. The new environment may well select for artists who are particularly adept at inventing new career paths rather than single-­mindedly focusing on their craft. There are certainly pockets of the creative world, like those critically acclaimed books dropping off the mainstream best-­seller lists, where the story is discouraging. And even the positive trends shouldn’t be interpreted as a mindless defense of the status quo. Most full-time artists barely make enough money to pay the bills, and so if we have levers to pull that will send more income their way — whether these take the form of government grants, Kickstarter campaigns or higher fees for the music we stream — by all means we should pull those levers.

But just because creative workers deserve to make more money, it doesn’t mean that the economic or technological trends are undermining their livelihoods. If anything, the trends are making creative livelihoods more achievable. Contrary to Lars Ulrich’s fear in 2000, the ‘‘diverse voices of the artists’’ are still with us, and they seem to be multiplying. The song remains the same, and there are more of us singing it for a living.