Who Owns The Content Creators?

The traditional relationship between a brand and agency, graphic designer, developer, writer, composer, or whoever else, was pretty straightforward. One creates content for the other, and does a series of edits until the party paying the other for their work is happy. This has all changed in the past five or so years, as the nature of the internet has changed.

It’s now impossible to imagine a content creator working professionally without an online presence, which if course, in turn means social media. Within that an artist has to give up a lot their privacy and expose parts of themselves those who followed the same path decades earlier wouldn’t have had to.

This has lead to some awkward recent exposures of how the attention markets now work, as FKA TWIGS, Charli XCX, Ed Sheeran and Florence Welch have all voiced that their labels instructing them to get on TikTok and produce “viral content” with no further instructions or help. Halsey posted more explicitly that she was told by her label she couldn’t release a new single unless she produced some hit TikTok content and then guided her that it should have something to do with empowering women or diversity or similar topic the kids were down with.

Those my age will have been able to retroactively create a portfolio online of our work and carefully manage what we expose and what we don’t. My children are everywhere in my work, because they are my life. My cat Bailey is beloved for her inescapability in video conferences, as when she hears me talking to an unknown voice, she immediately comes in and circles my desk and lap in a soft war for my attention.

We mostly find our artists and partners at Mash Gang through social media, and many brands find content creators or ‘influencers’ if you want to use that term, through social too. Most commonly through a partner or tool that finds the people with the biggest relevant audiences or most engaged communities. The organic alternative is someone in the brand or marketing team sitting on Instagram for several hours and trying to second guess what their audience would like, which is a bit like sending a squirrel down a coal mine and hoping it comes back with a diamond.

Which, to be fair, is what we do. But we work for ourselves and love everyone we work with, I wouldn’t expect someone without invested interests to give as much of a shit about my can art as we do.

The long journey we’ve just been on, is me getting to this point:

Once upon a time we could separate art from artist, now it’s almost impossible to. People pay for ownership of content, but does the nature of the beast mean they’re also paying for ownership of the content creator?

Brands are notoriously fearful of the risks to their brand from working with third parties. I’ve seen content creators rejected by global brands because they’ve sworn in content before, and I’ve seen alcohol brands reject possible partners because they’ve posted images of themselves smoking cigars at a wedding or holding their daughter on their lap with a whisky in their hand at new year. I’ve seen musicians rejected because of a number of things, from having a private education to having a relative who was in prison. It’s frequently subjective and always errs on the side of caution.

The end result is successful content creators exist knowing that they are expected to live publicly like children’s television presenters, or they may not be able to get paid work.

When approached by one large YouTuber a couple of years back about a potential partnership, I flagged that they had several videos that would mean they’d never make it through legal approval, and their first response was to make those videos private and ask me if it would work now.

This is a complete 180 from the world many millennials and older grew up in where any kind of willing submission to a corp was potentially a career ending sell out.

When my first band got signed, others in the local music scene printed up vinyl stickers and plastered the town declaring we were “Brighton’s Prettiest Boy Band”. Which turned out to be a boon, as it got people talking. Jack, our drummer, even had one he removed from a toilet wall on his wallet for a year or so.

The world is different now though. Every content creator from musicians through to weavers, fashion and trainer designers, have to be entrepreneurial to survive.

Up until 15 or so years ago, you could essentially be a high functioning drug addict vampire and successful musician, only showing up to do an interview, film a video, or play a show, fifteen minutes after your manager had herded you into a taxi, lured by the promise of warm latkes and chai lattes. You could be an adult baby and as long as you made good content, others who relied on that content to pay their mortgages would ensure you were dressed, fed, and paying their mortgages.

Now you have to build a career and become successful before anyone will want to work with you, which includes managing yourself to that point. The vast majority of creatives can’t do this, so it’s a divorce before marriage if they can’t find someone to help with that side of their lives. Paying a mortgage is no longer down to having capable people around you to ensure you make good work and that reaches enough people to convert into cash, it’s now down to you managing yourself on a treadmill hoping people want to pay for you to make them content.

This extends beyond the brand and creator relationship though, as far as fans and creators.

Steve Lacy is in the news as I type this for his responses to new fans who’ve found him through his songs turning up in TikTok trends. Essentially, Steve is a well respected producer and musician who’s a member of The Internet and produced for the likes of Denzel Curry, Kendrick Lamar, Kali Uchis, Solange and Mac Miller. However, this new viral fame has resulted in new fans trying to film TikToks with him while he’s performing onstage, trying to get him to stop singing mid-song to say hi to someone’s mum who’s on a phone, people throwing phones on stage for him to film videos on, fans singing along to the first thirty seconds of a verse but knowing no further lyrics in a four minute long song because that’s all of the song they know from TikTok and similar. Steve has shouted down people, smashed a camera and walked off stage mid-song multiple times this week.

His frustration is understandable, because a decade of hard work, artistry and legacy, has been reduced to the soundtrack of an event that people want to film themselves participating in for thirty seconds in order to fuel their own content machines.

Mitski initially retired from music in 2019 because of the confusing relationship she has with her fans, it’s tiring having no privacy and creating deeply personal music, only to be treated like a Nike hat. This quote stuck in my mind:

Returning to the industry in 2022, she requested on Twitter (via management as she retired from social media in 2019) that people shouldn’t watch and film the entire show through their phones as it’s best to live in the moment together, as it’s a relationship that’s wonderful but transient. Fans instead responded calling her bestie, mum or other terms of endearment, before detailing how she was harming their mental health and she needed to shut up and do what she was paid to do.

So, who does own the content creators?

Their content, regardless of if it was created for a cola brand’s out of home campaign, or their OnlyFans subscribers, belongs to the world. The nature of the beast means things we find exceptional, significant or emotional enough are going to be shared with others we love, or broadcast to the general public for clout. Those who paid for it have the right to dictate and direct it’s production and usage, but they don’t have ownership of the reaction of others to it. I love my favourite Manet and Andy Warhol works regardless of who owns the rights or original canvases.

The creators themselves exist in a void now though. They rely on social media platforms and their terms and conditions to reach an audience, meaning their work is censored and formatted in ways that work for the platform rather than the artist or audience. And their potential to continue to exist as a content creator rests entirely in the hands of those who pay them for their works, be that the social media platforms themselves in return for having appropriate work to monetize through adverts, brand partners who’d want to work with them, or fans who’ll pay to support them, providing they are willing to submit to their demands in ways only brands would have dared to historically.

As a result, many face constraints on what they say, how they live and the work they produce that has been unheard of since the 1960s. Lots embrace those, but many also choose to play devils avocado in return for a potential media career through offending strangers, or to follow the OnlyFans route because mainstream brands are unlikely to ever want to work with someone like them in the first place.

And please remember this the next time you wonder why gen z haven’t produced any high functioning drug addict rock and roll vampire bands, and every influencer now seems either like a children’s tv presenter or soft porn model. As these are the most viable paths we’ve created for content creators to pay their mortgages: angel or whore. And many of those in marginalised communities would never get a shot at wearing angel wings in the first place.