Context Is Everything: The Changing Artist Economy

Artists talk a lot about sustainability.

But they are not getting closer to that. The corporate interests that control publishing, streaming, and manufacturing are only ratcheting up their economic leverage. Each year the artist gets a smaller piece of the pie.

And it’s by design.

Did you know Spotify can pay artists whatever it wants to? Or that it doesn’t have to pay artists at all?

And that Amazon can, too?

And why? Because artists have no economic leverage. Because they operate as individuals, not as a bloc.

The “solutions” embraced a decade ago — of seamless digital distribution and online commerce — have bled artists dry.

It’s time for a change — for artists to build self-sustaining platforms rather than rely on “innovative” tech predations. It’s time for them to control all aspects of their businesses. And that means producing records and books in-house, distributing them independently, and marketing them “guerrilla”-style with as low an overhead as possible.

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We have all experienced the modern artist economy. So what is Wampus doing about it? We are trading our emphasis as a distributor of products for one as a designer of brand context.

It’s who you are, in other words — not just what you sell.

Wampus is a curated gallery. A home. It is a designed context for the artist and their work.

Home is where we live and breathe. And context is everything.

About Mark Doyon

I run Wampus, a creative development agency and label for emerging artists and authors. I make records as Arms of Kismet (and sometimes Waterslide), and wrote the book 'Bonneville Stories.'