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In a previous article on the other side of my blog I argued that the creative industries have a convex payoff. In short: anything creative work which is for sale is subject to wildly unpredictable payoffs where maybe people get nothing or little, but those who make it get an incredible payoff. This is essentially a positive outcome for a tail event. See previous article for some notes on tail events.

Part of the reason that I wrote the article was to address the fear that the Internet is making it harder to earn money in the modern age from creative works because of the ease of making and sharing duplicate copies of digital media (aka pirating). My contention was that it is now easier to share media and therefore the potential number of artists can be larger now than ever before and with lower costs too.

The other reason that I wrote the article was to introduce the idea of convexity to people who are not aware of it. Here's a quote from my previous article that summarises that reason (Convexity, copyright, and digital media):

"How does a creative artist prosper from this new digital reality? By understanding how the digital age works,  how the upcoming generation behaves, and most importantly: convexity."

So the reason for writing this article is to highlight a New York Times article which potentially proves my point: "The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t": It provides the data to back it up too.

"Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever."

"In 1999, the national economy supported 1.5 million jobs in that category; by 2014, the number had grown to nearly 1.8 million. This means the creative class modestly outperformed the rest of the economy, making up 1.2 percent of the job market in 2001 compared with 1.3 percent in 2014."

This contradicts the point that Internet piracy is killing the creative industries which was part of what I said. It doesn't quite prove what I said about convexity, but I do think it is true. The number of "authors" seems to be huge, and higher than I would have ever thought.

Proving convexity can be shown indirectly by finding the income distribution of artists; given that some artists earn nothing, while others earn billions then it is essentially self-evident that the creative industries have a convex payoff. The barriers to entry are lower now than ever which means that the costs of getting involved are lower and hence the risk taken is less now than ever before.