The fact is that almost everything that almost everyone has ever done to make money from the arts — including the old ways of making money from the arts — mostly didn’t work. We always look back on artistic incomes with what economists call survivor bias. We look at the people who succeeded and not the people who failed.

The way that artists used to make money was — say, if they were a writer — to write books until a publisher published them and the publisher’s salesforce convinced the multiplicity of book-selling channels to take their work, and so on. What you have to acknowledge is that almost nobody succeeded at doing that. And of the people who succeeded at finding a publisher, almost none of them made any money from it. And of the people who made money from it, almost none of them made very much money from it. And of the people who made some money from it, most of them didn’t make money in the long term.

So, effectively, making money in the arts is and always has been something that happens to almost no one.