[LINK] Why Pro-Amateurs are the Future

[Rachel Polanskis]

Me too ;)
Seriously, I discovered Cocos2d over christmas and have set myself a 99c challenge!
There are so many toolkits out there now,  frameworks, arduinos, and so on and it will 
eventually payoff in creative convergence, with 3D printing, design sharing and the rest.
Perhaps there is a positive swing to the shenzen effect in that tech is cheap enough now
that anyone can create almost anything with it....


rachel

--
rachel polanskis 
<r.polanskis at uws.edu.au> 
<grove at zeta.org.au>

On 09/02/2012, at 11:47, Robin Whittle <rw at firstpr.com.au> wrote:

> Hi Kim,
> 
> Thanks for mentioning this article:
> 
>> http://www.gamesbrief.com/2012/01/why-pro-amateurs-are-the-future/
> 
> This is a repost of a piece by Tadhg Kelly:
> 
>  http://whatgamesare.com/2012/01/why-pro-amateurs-are-the-future.html
> 
> He is discussing the creation of music, writing, computer games and I
> guess some kinds of software, including perhaps "apps" for mobile devices.
> 
> Some quotes are below.
> 
>  - Robin
> 
>> Creative industries tend to be like clubs. You can get into the
>> club in many ways, but all of them are equally difficult. You've
>> put the time in, done the training, had the lucky breaks,
>> struggled and finally made it.
> 
>> Once you are actually in the club then life is easier. You have
>> a name, you are a part of a network and you work with a lot of
>> the same people year in year out. Members rarely fall out of the
>> club entirely.
> 
>> However, part of being 'in' is the sense that the club can't get
>> too big, and for many the internet is actually pushing to make
>> the club smaller. Book publishers, for example, no longer offer
>> much in the way of advances. Long-tail services like Netflix and
>> Spotify have such huge libraries that every new artist is competing
>> not just with their peers, but their antecedents also. Distribution
>> may rise but prices fall.
>> 
>> They feel squeezed by piracy. Though they dislike it, many who are
>> 'in' quietly believe that they have to keep many more people 'out'
>> in order to hold on to what remains.
> 
>> Those who are 'in' also feel squeezed by something else:
>> Democratisation of tools. It’s bad enough that they have to deal with
>> a loss of revenue, but a reduction of difficulty in getting into the
>> club threatens to increase its size many times over. The future is a
>> world awash with low-rent ebooks, GarageBand music and GameMaker-
>> developed games.
> 
>> The magic of the internet is therefore this: It substitutes time
>> spent getting into the club with time spent finding fans.
> 
>> For most, those days of a publisher acting as an angel investor to
>> an artist while they hone their craft are over. The publisher can’t
>> afford it and the pro-amateur doesn’t need it.
>> 
>> Instead the new model sees the pro-amateur doing the work of
>> building the market, and then perhaps later a publisher or aggregator
>> cuts a deal with her to scale that operation up. The artist becomes
>> part-business person and so she makes better art. And, in the end, we
>> will all win.
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