The plight of the creative class
The DIY musician’s membership platform set out to provide a livelihood for artists on the internet. Is it more than just a band-aid for a broken system?
It’s 11.16am on a saturday, and Jack conte – bright-eyed, bushy-bearded – Is zigzagging around a cramped Los angeles recording studio, dodging eight musicians, two cameramen, a sound engineer, and a profusion of Instruments, cords, and mic stands. “Let’s do it!” he cries out, sounding martial and chipper at once. Conte’s been here since 9.00am, leading everyone through a packed day of recording. When the clock strikes 11.17am and the doing-it has yet to commence, he cries out again, “Let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s go!”
Together with his wife,
the singer-songwriter Nataly Dawn, Conte is onehalf of a band called Pomplamoose. They've spent 11 years together building an online following, mostly on the strength of their idiosyncratic, hyper-proficient pop covers – Lady Gaga's “Telephone” featuring eight-part harmonies, a xylophone, and a toy piano (9.5 million Youtube views); Beyoncé's “Single Ladies” arranged for upright piano, jazz bass, and an old Polaroid camera repurposed as a percussion instrument (11 million views). When they started out, Conte worked on the band full-time; he and Dawn would usually play all the instruments themselves. They also did all the arranging, filming, and editing. Making one video could take a week
But then Conte got a high-powered day job working in tech, and to keep their following alive, he and Dawn had to start squeezing an elaborate and intense production routine into the crevices of his schedule. Though they live in the Bay Area, these days the couple flies to LA, where session musicians are plentiful, to crank out music as Pomplamoose. “We come down here once a month and record four songs,” Conte says. “It’s a production flow – an assembly line.” They book eight-hour blocks of studio time, invite a rotating cast of musicians, and pay some guys to film and edit footage. This allows them to post one video per week to Youtube, for a total of 52 per year. It’s not an arbitrary regimen: “Youtube’s algorithm promotes channels that are releasing frequent content,” Dawn explains. “It’s tricky because you have to take the algorithm into consideration – otherwise you aren’t being a smart businessperson – but it changes frequently enough that you can’t just chase algorithms, either.” She thinks for a second. “I mean, you could, but we’re artists.”
It’s this exact tension, between artistry and algorithm-chasing, that drew Conte,
35, into tech in the first place. In 2013 he became co-founder and CEO of Patreon, an online crowdfunding platform. Since then, his company has become one of the most significant players in the frenetic, almost alchemical (which is to say possibly doomed) quest to convert digital creative work into a reliable paycheck for those who produce it.
Patreon sprang directly from Conte’s firsthand experience as a musician trying to make a career on Youtube between 2006 and 2013, a period marked, for Pomplamoose, by brief financial success and then a vortex of rapidly diminishing returns and meager ad-revenue-sharing agreements. As he saw his income dwindle, though, Conte spied a potentially lucrative market in the weird, quasi-intimate relationship between online creators and their most passionate fans. And from that recognition, Conte formalised a new model for supporting creative labour.
Here’s how Patreon works: You, a creator in search of funds, keep producing and distributing things wherever you usually do – Medium, Soundcloud, Youtube, whatever. But you also set up a Patreon page and direct your fans there in the hope that they will become your “patrons,” committing themselves to recurring monthly payments. (Unlike on Kickstarter, where supporters pitch in toward the completion of an individual project, on Patreon the money goes toward a creator’s ongoing output and livelihood generally.) In turn, Patreon encourages creators to treat these patrons less like charitable benefactors and more like members who have purchased admission to a club – entitling them to exclusive perks, whether it’s gated chat sessions, bonus content, or early peeks at a work in progress. The company makes money by taking a cut from all this fan-to-creator commerce. Patreon’s most recent valuation, in 2017, put the company’s worth at $450 million, but in 2019 both Techcrunch and Forbes have estimated that it is approaching $1 billion –
which is also the total sum Patreon says it will have sent to creators by year’s end.
Today Patreon’s ranks are full of musicians, podcasters, gamers, animators, illustrators, authors, photographers, and the like, and Conte’s ambitions for the company have grown – as Silicon Valley ambitions have a way of doing – into a promise of sweeping societal change. His goal, which festoons Patreon’s marketing copy, is nothing less than to “fund the creative class.” He has prophesied that “we’re going to get so good at paying creators, within 10 years, kids graduating high school and college are going to think of being a creator as just being an option – I could be a doctor, I could be a lawyer, I could be a podcaster, I could have a web comic.”
On a warm Tuesday evening
a month later, Conte opens the gate to the
East Bay home he shares with Dawn and their rescue dog, Muppet. The property, which they moved into last summer, is composed of two newly renovated buildings and an interior courtyard – one building contains their home studio, and the other is where they live. This studio is a long way from the makeshift one, across the Bay in Corte Madera, that Conte’s earliest fans first saw circa 2006, when he started uploading videos from his childhood bedroom. A recent college graduate at the time, Conte had moved back in with his dad while he tried to gain traction as an artist. Thanks to his father, music’s been part of Conte’s life for as long as he can remember. “When I was six my dad taught me the blues scale, and I started writing songs and improvising,” he recalls.
Describing his favourite music, he’s analytical in a way that makes his eventual transition into tech seem more probable: “There were certain types of chords and chord structures and sounds I liked, and they were consistent,” he says, whether he was listening to jazz, classical, pop, or electronic music:
“It was mode mixture, chords where there’s a sharp 4 in the melody. It’s kind of regalsounding, it sounds important.”
In 2002 Conte enrolled at Stanford, where he met Dawn at a campus coffee shop. Raised
‘People use crowdfunding campaigns to help pay catastrophic medical bills. is Patreon the same for art?’
in France and Belgium by religious academics, Dawn played Christian rock in her teens, and as a Stanford undergraduate she majored in art before getting her master’s in French literature. Conte, for his part, thought he might study filmmaking, then physics, but he decided to stick with his earliest passion, majoring in music. He did so under the auspices of Stanford’s avant-garde-leaning Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, but Conte’s preferences tended to the more readily intelligible, albeit with stylistic curveballs thrown in. “I really like incorporating noise music into pop,” he says. “Kid A is my favourite record.”
Conte’s college roommate, Sam Yam, tells me that amid a sea of fellow students intent on becoming tech impresarios and investment bankers, Conte stood out for his devotion to oddball creativity. Yam recalls the elaborate claymation sets Conte constructed in their dormitory, for music videos and other larks. After graduation, Yam says, “I think we synced up a few times, but basically I viewed him as being a mini-celebrity on Youtube.”
Conte tried traditional musical avenues at first, like café open mics. But he was early to see the potential of Youtube, and there he was able to build a sizable fan base and eventually earn a living – thanks to videos marked by SEO savvy and winningly homemade aesthetics. Conte liked to film each individual bass pluck and conga slap that went into a given song, »
editing these together into kinetic documents of the recording process.
To broaden Pomplamoose’s audience, the duo specialised in pop covers, which appeared high in search results and drove people to itunes to purchase Pomplamoose’s songs.
In the late 2000s, converting their view count into ad revenue, itunes downloads, product placement deals, live gigs, and even a commission from Hyundai to make commercials, Conte and Dawn made enough money to buy a house in rural Cotati, California, and make music full-time. But it was a precarious livelihood: Early on, Pomplamoose made as much as R900 000 per year by sending viewers to download its songs on itunes. Then Spotify came along and decimated that model, replacing all that download income with a mere R90 000 in streaming income. They were circling the drain toward which all media flowed in the early teens: paltry ad-revenue-sharing deals with giant platforms.
Around the start of 2013, Conte got back in touch with Yam. In the years since graduation, Yam had founded and sold a mobile advertising platform, Adwhirl, and made a bunch of industry connections. “Jack told me he’d had this idea bubbling in his mind, and he was a little paranoid about the process of building a company,” Yam remembers.
Conte wanted to discuss his scheme but asked whether they ought to sign a non-disclosure agreement with each other first. Yam dismissed this caution as the jitters of a tech neophyte. “I was like, ‘Jack, the ideas don’t matter at all – it’s how you execute them,’ ” he says. “So we met up at Coffee Bar, in the Mission, and he shared the idea.” And Yam promptly reversed himself: “I was like, ‘Don’t tell anyone! I’m gonna start building it tonight.’”
Six years later,
who does Patreon serve best? Some 125 000 creators use the service, and according to the data-tracking site Graphtreon, they draw in more than 5 million pledges monthly. One of Patreon’s top-earning clients, grossing R2.1 million monthly from 31 000 patrons, is the bitingly funny leftistpolitics podcast Chapo Trap House, whose co-host, Will Menaker, has praised Patreon’s small-donor model as essential to the show’s existence and integrity. (Thanks to Chapo’s patrons, no Dollar Shave Club ads need interrupt the socialism.) The most popular musician on Patreon is the extremely online singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, who has more than 15 000 patrons and doesn’t disclose her earnings.
In predicting whether an artist will succeed on Patreon, Conte says, “the most important thing isn’t media or genre or platform – it’s how much do you love your fans, and how do they love you back? Are you making a thing that gives people all the feels, and do they just fucking love you?” This is not strictly a matter of artistic merit. “I don’t think Björk would do well on Patreon,” he explains. “Arguably, her fans think she makes great art. But does she love her fans, and do they love her back? I don’t know.” By and large, he says, Patreon privileges those creators who tend toward higherfrequency output and whose fans regard them as (mistake them for?) dear friends. “Amanda Palmer loves her fans and they love her,” Conte adds. “They actually feel love for her. That’s a particular type of artist. Not every artist wants that vulnerable, close, open relationship with their fans. Like, really tactically: Do you run fan-art contests? Do you respond to comments on Twitter? Do you sell soap – do a weird fun thing with your fans then send them a thing in the mail, thanking them for what they contributed?” If not, don’t count on making your rent via Patreon.
On a Thursday afternoon in June, Conte strides into a Patreon conference room for an executive strategy meeting whose overarching theme is how to grow the company faster. Patreon’s offices look every bit the part of the burgeoning tech success circa 2019: pouredconcrete everything, phalanxes of free cereal and on-tap beverages, motorised standing desks, bright pennants indicating whether the workers listed below (200 of them in all) work for the legal team or for “community happiness.” But Conte isn’t satisfied with Patreon’s total of 125 000 creators. “Patreon right now has such low market penetration,” he tells me before the meeting. “We’re a speck of dust. We’re not having an impact; we’re not changing the global systems of art and finance yet – and we want to.”
Patreon’s current internal goal is to substantially increase the number of what it calls “1K creators” – those earning at least $1 000 (R15 000) per month from their patrons. But what’s the best way to do that? That’s the question of the hour. Sitting opposite Conte, Wyatt Jenkins, a tattooed former DJ and tech veteran turned Patreon’s head of product, argues that the smart move is to lavish support and attention on creators in somewhat higher monthly earning brackets.
Conte cuts in: “Just to be clear, we’re not talking about changing the KPI” – key
performance indicator. “1K creators is the KPI.”
Jenkins nods. “It’s just how we get there,” he says. “I think we have to aim a little upstream and it’ll pull, because the 1Ks wanna be the 5Ks.” There’s a risk, he acknowledges. “The messaging will be super tricky,” Jenkins says, “because the downside of this message is
‘Oh, we don’t care about small creators as much,’ which just isn’t the fact. Of course we care about small creators. But when we build things, we aim at larger creators, and they’re the ones who inspire the smaller creators to do something bigger.”
One adverse effect of the
attention economy that people are only starting to reckon with is the problem of creator burnout. In a way analogous to, say, how Lyft and Uber drivers are forced to work ever-longer shifts for volatile, decreasing levels of compensation, online creators speak these days about the stresses of trying to feed an insatiable, algorithm-driven beast. We see a theatricalised version of this unfold at the end of an early Pomplamoose video: Dawn approaches Conte, lying face down on the floor, and informs him that they owe their fans a vlog. “I’m tiiired!” he moans. It’s played for laughs, but the undertones are dark. “I think about this a lot,” Conte tells me. “My first answer is that you gotta know your limit and be an adult about it. That said, the content treadmill?” He exhales. “Oh God. It’s exhausting. Even for someone like me, who has an insane work ethic – I think I’m unique, and still I can’t keep up. We had to build a team! It’s the only way to sustain that pace of creation!”
Which leads to a strange irony about Patreon. The service may very well allow artists to become less beholden to the unpredictable algorithms, turbulent monetisation policies, and stingy revenue-sharing of behemoth distribution platforms like Youtube. But in the absence of a viable alternative to those platforms, Patreon winds up effectively subsidising that very unpredictability, turbulence, and stinginess. Put another way, Patreon promises to make a Youtube creator’s life easier – a patently good thing – but in the process it puts no pressure on companies like Youtube to change the ways it hurts creators in the first place. What this means is that even Patreon’s CEO himself still sees fit to organise one weekend out of every month around the explicit goal of producing content for Youtube.
Conte nods as I float this line of reasoning past him. “If I could think of a way to solve the problem that doesn’t have that negative trade-off, I’d probably do it, but I don’t know how to get past the network effects,” he says. “I don’t know how to rebuild the behaviour from the ground up and break the Youtube ecosystem. They have a stranglehold, you know?” I mention the grim trend of people using crowdfunding campaigns to help pay catastrophic medical bills. No one would criticise Gofundme for facilitating such campaigns – another patently good thing – but they can’t come close, of course, to addressing the root problem, which is a broken health care system. Is Patreon the same kind of bandaid, but for a broken creative market? Conte concedes that “there’s an argument to be made that Patreon doesn’t address some of the negative side effects of the content treadmill and the current ad-driven ecosystems, or that it even finances those behaviours rather than cannibalise them – I think all those things are true.”
Can a single, private company really “fund the creative class”? From the perspective of a healthily functioning society, would that even be desirable? Some questions are too big to answer over pizza. “All you can do is make incremental improvements over long periods of time,” Conte says, “and I think the existence of Patreon is incrementally better than the non-existence of Patreon.”
I ask whether he’d like to eventually shift the balance in his life away from Patreon and back to music. “That’s not a goal,” he says. “This is a reckoning for me, but I’m actually – I’m, like, happier now than I was eight years ago, even with Pomplamoose taking off.” For one thing, “there’s things about Patreon I didn’t get with music: the scale of impact.” For another, “being an artist is hard. Personally and emotionally, it’s difficult. There’s a tension that exists as an artist that doesn’t exist as a business. That whole dilemma you have between making shit for your fans versus being a real artist? When you have customers who need things, you just fucking make the things they need, and you don’t feel guilty for making them! You don’t have that internal, pulling-my-soul-apart existential self-debate where you’re flogging yourself for doing fan service, or like, making a record that you’re not proud of because it’s what your fans want. That shit is so hard. That’s the I-can’t-sleep-at-night kind of hard.”
Conte smiles in a tentative way, as if he’s allowed himself to utter a truth he’s long been grappling with, getting a feel for how it sounds out loud. He says it again: “I’m a happier person now.”