The value chain

If you want to make a living through art, then you have to understand the difference between adding more and adding value.

Technology has made it incredibly easy for anybody to add more to the marketplace.  If a musician is so inclined, she can her songs recorded, mixed and placed on a newly designed website for sale in a matter of days.

If a group of actors want to do a performance, they can search the web for possible venues, have scripts delivered to their house, send out some emails to possible audience and have a show up in a few weeks.

Because of this, people (many of whom wouldn't self identify as artists) have gone about adding more to the marketplace. 

But if you want to make a living from such things you can't just add more.

You can't be just another thing in a sea of things.

You have to add value, which is WAY, WAY, harder then adding more.

That value can come from multiple sources, ticket sales, donations, merchandise, etc.

My point is that ultimately you must have a base of people that perceive value in your work.

One of the biggest challenges to accomplishing this in the arts, particularly the live performing arts, is simply a matter of scale.

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My little business, Mission Paradox, is easy to run.  It has no overhead, no extra office, no employees.  Since I operate on such a small scale, I can focus on delivering value to a pretty tiny group of people and everything is fine.  99.99% of the people in the world will never know about what I do and that's fine as long as the people who know about what I do see the value in it.

Performing arts organizations are much larger in scope.  If you run a dance company and you want to employ five dancers and two administrators full time and pay each of them $40,000 then you are talking about $280,000 a year . . . every year.  And that's before all the other necessary expenses.

That's a big number, which means that particular dance company needs to deliver a lot of freakin' value.

The problem is that we assume the art itself has sufficient enough value to build an entire organization around it.  Maybe it does.  Maybe it doesn't.

If it doesn't, then you have to find ways to deliver additional value.  You may need a heightened and more engaged relationship with your audience.  You may need to be seen as civic resource to your town.

It may be years or decades before your art evolves to the point where it can consistently bring in big revenue numbers on its own merit.  So you have to be willing to look at the entire value chain and constantly ask yourself where you (and your team) can use your artistic skills to bring value to a group of people.

Let me say this again, this isn't easy.  Every day tons of arts organizations start up.  Most of them are just adding more.  Developing value and the tools to demonstrate and promote that value isn't a walk in the park.

But it's one way to turn your dream of making a living from art into a reality.

 

 

 

Comments

[Don Hall]

Adam -

I see your essential point but don't you see that by placing the term value in such a way that it is, by your own definition, only measured by how much money people will pay for it, you completely minimize the art to nothing more than a commodity to be bought and sold?

[Adam]

I don't think assigning a price to something turns it into a commodity.

A commodity is something the public perceives as interchangeable with another product of the same type. So if I sell apples and you sell apples and the public believes that all apples are the same then we have ourselves a commodity and you and are going to have to compete based on price.

It's not the price that created the commodity, it's the thing itself.

I have (and I'm sure you have as well) see art that thrilled us, changed, made us think, etc. I've paid a lot for those experiences as a reflection of the value they gave to me.

That's how I see entering a marketplace, you give value and then you try to get some of it back. I'm not saying it's always a 1 to 1 thing. You may have to give $5 worth of perceived value to get $1 back but that's still how I see it.

[Don Hall]

Thus our eternal disagreement.

I see the value of theater far beyond that of assigning it monetary value.