Ask HN: Why aren't there more startups in the art field?

6 points by GeoffreyKr ↗ HN

13 comments

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Please, define "Art" first.
Art : relative to art exhibitions, museums, the way people get access to Art (painting, photo, video, etc... the more traditional art support), buy/consume/share Art, etc...
Why do you think there isn't? https://angel.co/art

There's more in fintech, adtech, etc, but there's quite a lot in the art space too.

I don't read many article about it, that's why I think there isn't much :) (thanks for the link)
Because two large forms of art are locked away using copyright by legacy companies unwilling to innovate. Those legacy companies seem to be trying their hardest to kill off the two "newest" outlets for that media.

And physical art only has worth because of its scarcity.

Which two are you thinking of?
I'm guessing recorded music and film/TV.
Bingo. Music and video. The services being Netflix and Spotify. I don't like their model, I would rather own the content, but that doesn't mean I want to see them run into the ground. The industries seem to want to stunt them.

Video content is split between several services and locked into regions. All of it comes with DRM and as far as I know all of it is streamed.

Music is fairing a little better. Most popular music is sold my most stores. I think all of it is DRM free these days. However music is being pulled off Spotify due to moaning about how little per play the copyright holders recieve. There are some dodgy stories emerging about "back room deals" to try to kill off free content on various services.

On the creating-art side: artistic works are tricky to sell compared to problem-solving goods (try defining the benefits vs features of, say, a print of Wheat Field With Crows), and it's a field where demand is frequently outstripped by supply.

I've worked in movies for 20 years and those are the two biggest problems that keep hitting me.

On the helping-artists side: There's plenty of space within the film world for startups, and plenty of startups or small tech companies. Most of them are hardware-based, though.

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There is basically no viable way to monetize electronic distribution of creative output. You can sell tickets to physical facilities, but this very much doesn't scale in the way that the startup community wants to. Which is why we don't see startups making art.

OTOH, we also don't really see startups making products to facilitate making art. My field is theater, and we are served by a lot of tech companies, but none of them are SV-style startups. For starters, nearly all products relevant to our work are hardware, which is already hard on the SV infrastructure.

It's also very easy to tell when i.e. your light board was made by a bunch of software engineers reading a specification, rather than a bunch of lighting designers. The latter is vastly preferred by the market. But lighting designers have interests and hobbies outside software engineering. They don't spend their spare time writing code, they spend it making theater. So they're not going to have extremely active GitHubs or be "passionate" enough to work 80 hours a week. Silicon Valley does everything in its power to make sure people like that don't get hired. So the corporate 9-5 workplaces eat its lunch, because they can attract talent that wants to continue doing art on the side.

Finally, as a broader point, the HN community (which I take to be pretty representative of the startup community) is extremely proud of its open hostility to non-STEM people. Hardly a week goes by without a circle-jerk about how all non-STEM college majors should be disbanded and the people in them are all subhuman failures wasting their time and taxpayer money for not going into STEM. Artists are fundamentally people who picked a career that's not in demand, and HN hates them for it. It's not surprising that the startup community isn't attuned to the products they want to buy.

The big disruption already happened thirty odd years ago with Iris Printers and the widespread production of giclée canvases. It's big business selling canvas prints to hotels and office buildings etc. It's also a nice source of mailbox checks for working professional painters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gicl%C3%A9e