Camille Hearst: observation

Transcript context

…So you work with artists and I actually wanted to ask this question. What's the best part about working with artists, musical artists, and what's the worst part? I think the best part is working with people who really lean into their creativity and their passion so much so that they do it for a living. And I think a lot of us have creative pursuit and passions and things we love to do and if we made millions of dollars and could retire, what would you do full time? Usually, it's one of these pursuits. But I think it takes an element of bravery, not to mention talent, but you really have to go out on a limb. And so that's this equality that exists in this group of people and it's fun to be around and feel that rub off on you and think, "Oh, maybe I could take the dive one day and I don't know, go do my calligraphy or learn my ukulele and then do it full time." But that's the best part. And the thing I'm really... I grew up in a musical household. My dad's a drummer although his joke when we were growing up was real musicians have day jobs because he had to actually have a job with benefit to support the family and couldn't just be gigging full time. Which actually brings me to the flip side of the question which you asked what is the hardest part. I do think we saw this a lot at Patreon and I think you see it especially with musicians and artists, this feeling that you want to give your fans everything that you create and you want to do it for free because you're so enamored with this idea that people really love you and want to support you and they're really responding to your creativity and everything that you're making, you don't want to charge them. But what comes with that is, well, how are you going to make a living. To some degree, there has to be a value exchange that happens in order for a creative person to live from their art. And I've found that that's much more pronounced with musicians, this starving artist ethos which makes what I'm trying to do actually quite difficult because a lot of the feedback we get is, "Oh, that's awesome. I want to have a listening party and have everything be free and just have everyone show up and don't sell anything." And we're really looking at it as a way to fans want to support the artists they love, they want to open up their wallets. You've see nothing else from a Substack and Patreons that people are actually really happy to be a patron of the arts and they look at it as like a badge of honor. But musicians in particular I think tend to shy away from that which makes the kind of thing that I'm working on more difficult. This's a great segue to an area I want to spend time on is the creator economy and creators and artists and things like that. And along these lines, I think I have this issue too. I feel bad charging people but there's also... I don't think my stuff is worth enough to charge for and why would anyone ever pay anything for it and so I imagine you see that too. It's just like, "No one's going to pay for this. It's crazy."…

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