Carly: Who gives haircuts by force?!
Sam: I don’t know, but if this was a real TV show, it’d be more popular than anything on NBC.
—iCarly
From the way I’ve talked about Millennials so far, you might think we’re robots, with no creativity to speak of. Analyzing the production of individuals based on the changing structures that influence them might be the best method we have for understanding generational change, but it also tends to downplay a lot of the best parts of being alive. Young people aren’t just clay to be shaped; we also make something out of what is made of us. Kids are extremely inventive; they make songs and art and play games, and even though Millennials have less free time for this kind of activity, facility with advanced new tools allows them to create more faster. This “kids’ stuff” occasionally attracts the attention of a wider audience, and a rare few young Americans become marketable stars. In this chapter, I want to look at entertainment, because it’s one of the few areas where young people stand out both as amateurs and professionals. The distance between stars and the rest of us has never felt smaller, but they may hold a more rarefied place.
Unsurprisingly, the same trends that affect the quality of young people’s work also affect the quality of their play. Making, recording, and distributing performances and art have never been even close to this easy, and kids are taking advantage. Between YouTube, camera-enabled smartphones, music editing software, and online platforms, most teens have everyday access to tools that were hard to imagine—never mind get your hands on—just a couple of decades ago. Everything goes magnitudes faster now, including the speed of creativity. With some talented friends and hard work, kids can now make and distribute professional-caliber media from home.
Like Advanced Placement students, aspiring stars have to work harder to stand out from an increasingly crowded field. Gone are the days of record industry stooges prowling the alleys of Seattle hunting for an authentic band willing to play ball; these are the days of rap producers throwing their beats at anyone who will listen. Hustling has always been part of trying to come up in the creative world, but like everything else, it has intensified. The Fresh Prince could rap about relaxing, but now “work” is the name of the game, from Britney Spears to Gucci Mane. Popular media production is so rationalized that there are teens who can do optimized hooks and brand strategy better than the adult professionals can.
In sports, we see the same dynamic at play as in all the other sectors we’ve examined: Higher rewards for stars, and increased competition for a small number of slots, have led to intensified training. Kids playing around in the sandlot has turned to preprofessional amateurism, and some amateur sports have become professional in all but their pay scale. Like any other ability, athletic skill and training are stored in the body. They’re just a rarefied form of human capital, and you get them the same way: from work. Through hard practice and training, kids learn to do amazing things. Talent helps, but athletes can’t get much further on talent alone than being picked first in gym class. Rationalization has turned games built on luck and fun into exemplary late-capitalist entertainment industries whose product is outstanding bodies tuned to perfection. Because sports makes human capital accumulation especially visible—we are supposed to watch, after all—it gives us special insight into the process. As capital advances, all workers become more like athletes.
Marv Marinovich wasn’t a very good professional football player, but he understood something about the game—about the future of sports in general—that other Americans didn’t. After his short NFL career, Marinovich went on to help establish strength and conditioning training as a fixture in every locker room. Compared to the Soviet Union, twentieth-century American athletic training was haphazard. (Think of Rocky IV, in which the USSR’s champion Ivan Drago trains for a roomful of scientists measuring his punching power, while the hyper-American Rocky lugs unrefined timber around Siberia.) But Rocky’s epic victory notwithstanding, the Soviet methods worked, and led them to top the medal count in seven of nine Winter Olympics and six of nine Summer Games. Marinovich studied these rationalized techniques and brought them to the NFL’s Oakland Raiders. But though he was more successful as a trainer than a player, Marinovich never had the chance to make up for his failures on the field. That is, until July 4, 1969, when his son Todd was born.
Marv trained his son Todd to be a star quarterback quite literally from the time he was born. In his Esquire essay on the father and son Marinovich, Mike Sager describes the strict regimen:
As a baby, Todd was fed only fresh vegetables, fruits, and raw milk; when he was teething, he was given frozen kidneys to gnaw. As a child, he was allowed no junk food; Trudi sent Todd off to birthday parties with carrot sticks and carob muffins. By age three, Marv had the boy throwing with both hands, kicking with both feet, doing sit-ups and pull-ups, and lifting light hand weights. On his fourth birthday, Todd ran four miles along the ocean’s edge in thirty-two minutes, an eight-minute-mile pace. Marv was with him every step of the way.1
Marv had thirteen specialists and advisors and consultants of all stripes donating their time to work on every part of Todd’s body and game, and at the middle was Todd himself, doing the labor that other people could only advise him to do. And for a time, it worked. Marinovich was a standout high school quarterback, setting the national passing record and earning his own Sports Illustrated feature before he could drink. Todd told SI he wanted to be the best quarterback of all time, and it didn’t seem farfetched.2 With his natural talent and rationalized training, it’s hard to imagine how you could possibly create a better football player than Todd Marinovich. At USC, the redshirt freshman Marinovich led the Trojans to a victory in the Rose Bowl. He made Sports Illustrated again, but this time he got the cover.
From there, it was all downhill. With his father’s protective bubble popped, Todd began drinking and using drugs more, and behaving erratically. After a disappointing year at USC, he declared for the NFL draft, but his peak was already past. He bottomed out, moving from menial jobs to trouble with the law. Now Todd makes wood sculptures and expressionist paintings on the beach.
The Marinovich Project, as ESPN called the documentary, was a mixed success at best, but the idea that you could turn a kid into a world-class athlete stuck. And as competition for higher education slots intensified and costs rose, parents began to realize that being a star athlete entitles kids to a free ride at a top school in a way that being a star history student does not. There are no guarantees when it comes to raising kids, but practice definitely works, and one thing all athletes who play competitively share is a lot of childhood labor. The most dominant athletes are trained Marinovich-style, from toddlerhood. Tiger Woods’s dad, Earl, had him putting on national television at the age of two. Venus and Serena Williams were running around a tennis court at five. Tim Lincecum—who won two Cy Young awards by the age of twenty-six—pitches using a delivery designed by his engineer dad. We use terms like “prodigy” for kids like these, but while some people are more naturally athletic than others, no one is born a champion. The way we talk about how children become athletes downplays the work they do. There’s no question that a coach is doing labor when she tells a kid to run another lap, but once again the pedagogical mask prevents us from seeing the kids running around as working too. At a certain point they must decide to compete.
Building muscle is a great way of thinking about human capital because it’s so literal: Work over time accumulates in the body. No one can do a push-up for you, and push-ups are not for sale at any price. Because this kind of human capital accumulation is physical, we can count it directly instead of looking at secondary market measures like worker productivity. In a 2013 paper for the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, a team of researchers looked at the change in body composition in American football players between 1942 and 2011. They looked at linemen and backs in particular because those are the positions at which size makes the greatest difference. What they found conforms to what we’ve seen about the accumulation of human capital: Football players are getting bigger and taller in general. But when the researchers look for an explanation, they cite “improved strength and conditioning programs, better overall training practices, enhanced nutritional intake, and possibly even the use of performance enhancing drugs”—but not increased work or the heightened competition that would reward it.3 The same is true in basketball: Viraj Sanghvi analyzed NBA players by height and weight from the beginning of the league into the present. Between the 1940s, when the NBA began, and now, the average player’s height jumped a substantial four inches, and the average player gained nearly fifty pounds.4 The difference between 6′3″ 175 and 6′7″ 220 supports the thesis that we’ve witnessed a qualitative shift. American professional athletes, like other workers, are better prepared for their jobs.
Obviously, all the push-ups in the world can’t make you four inches taller, so what explains this change? What it indicates is that the professional leagues are drawing on a larger pool of potential players: They’ve improved the process for finding, cultivating, and recruiting talent. For example, Forbes called the NBA’s pursuit of seven-foot players “a years-long, worldwide search to identify and maximize talent unlike any other industry.”5 Globalization and rationalized recruitment have increased competition among workers in all industries, but rarely is one outstanding individual—rather than an idea, a product, or a business—worth so much to so many people.
As we’ve seen, with money, time, and technology comes rationalization. Leading the charge in professional sports was the young Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. Baseball has always been a game of statistics—even earning its own neologism, “sabermetrics”—but until recently the metrics weren’t evolving as fast as data technology. Beane had to compete using an uncompetitive payroll, and he succeeded by relying on rigorous data analysis and bucking conventional scouting wisdom. He emphasized cutting unnecessary costs and picking up bargain players who would perform better than their contracts indicated. This so-called moneyball strategy is the same thing employers are doing in general: rationalizing to decrease labor costs. Displacing batting and earned run averages, “wins against replacement,” or WAR, has become the most popular metric for player analysis. Rather than averages that middle schoolers calculate for math practice, WAR is an incredibly complex formula that tries to estimate how many team wins a particular player is responsible for. Intangibles that have mystified fans and coaches for ages no longer drive the industry, and statisticians break team sports into precise individual contributions.
Scouting has always been a romantic part of American sports. The system for recognizing talent was as disorganized and serendipitous as the distribution of talent itself, with broad networks of affiliated insiders knit together by personal relationships. Here’s how Bernard Malamud described the early days of baseball scouting through the eyes of a character named Sam in his classic 1952 novel, The Natural:
Tramping highways and byways, wandering everywhere bird dogging the sandlots for months without spotting so much as a fifth-rater he could telegraph about to the head scout of the Cubs, and maybe pick up a hundred bucks in the mail as a token of their appreciation, with also a word of thanks for his good bird dogging and maybe they would sometime again employ him as a scout on the regular payroll.6
Prospects themselves couldn’t expect to be paid much more. Professional sports weren’t so lucrative that most players hoped to make careers out of them, and they certainly didn’t spend their childhoods eating carob in athletic academies. But as in other industries, exclusionary restrictions that protected white American workers from competition began to break down during the second half of the twentieth century. First, whites-only sports integrated, markedly improving the level of play. Then, teams figured out there was literally a whole world of potential superstars out there, almost all of whom were cheaper to sign than their domestic equivalents.
In the NBA, more than one in five players are now foreign-born. Over a quarter of MLB players were born outside the US, and cross-border financial incentives have led to the development of baseball academies throughout Latin America.7 As the capitalists who run professional sports realize that exceptional athletic talent isn’t concentrated in the English-speaking world, scouts and agents are willing to travel farther afield. The 2014 movie Million Dollar Arm tells the true story of sports agent JB Bernstein, who convinced investors to fund a reality show talent search in India for the best potential pitcher. In a population of a billion, he figured, there had to be at least one pro-caliber arm. He found two, signing Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel to minor league contracts with the Pittsburgh Pirates even though neither of the javelin throwers had tossed a baseball before entering the competition. Two years after Million Dollar Arm came One in a Billion, a documentary about 7′2″ Satnam Singh Bhamara, the first Indian player drafted by an NBA team. These pro sports recruiters went to India for the same reason offshoring companies do: discount labor. In an untapped market the size of India, even one in a billion is a sure bet. Globalization means more competition for American ballplayers, but it’s far from the only cause.
Despite general decreases in childhood physical play, American kids are playing a lot more organized sports. In 2013, ESPN (the magazine) tried to examine youth sports participation—with the caveat that “Youth sports is so big that no one knows quite how big it is.” The best estimates suggest that a significant majority of American kids age six to seventeen play on an organized sports team—between 20 and 30 million children every year, including a million and a half six-year-olds.8 Title IX in 1972 forced high schools to provide equal opportunity for girls and women to participate, which has increased their participation by orders of magnitude. One survey cited by ESPN found that 69 percent of girls age eight to seventeen played on a school or club team the year before.
Organized sports have taken the place of self-organized play, and though league games count for their college applications in a way that sandlot ball doesn’t, kids are missing out on the important experience of following and enforcing their own rules. In the age of rationalized training regimens, autonomy gets in the way of labor development. The stereotype that low-income kids disproportionately play sports as a way to escape their circumstances is wrong; instead, high parental income drives early participation. Children of low-income parents (under $35,000) join teams at a mean age of eight, while the children of high-income parents (over $100,000) start at just over six.9 More kids planning to round out their résumé s with varsity letters—or get a foot into higher education at all—means more competition at every level of amateur play. Participation trophies have become a symbol for generational weakness, but no AYSO-playing Millennial fourth grader ever owned a trophy factory—we’re not giving trophies to ourselves. The market for plastic awards has grown with the level of competition, organization, and anxiety about success. And whenever we see some shiny and worthless distinction pinned to a Millennial, we should flash back to Danny Dunn and his homework prize: a low-cost reward for work that kids never realized they were doing in the first place.
Everyone has to work harder and from a younger age to have a shot at success, even if success just means starting on the middle school basketball team. One positive outcome of this trend—though perhaps not much comfort to the players working overtime—has been more entertaining amateur play, especially at the collegiate level.
Like the rest of higher education, college sports has become big business. Football and basketball in particular are cash cows for the schools that do well. A new college football play-off earned the NCAA (and its member universities) $470 million from ESPN in its inaugural year alone,10 and the Association is in the middle of a fourteen-year $11-billion deal with CBS and TBS to broadcast the annual March Madness basketball tournament.11 And that’s just some of the TV money; it doesn’t include apparel sales, tickets and concessions, alumni donations, or the invaluable media coverage and prestige that universities get when they win. The vast majority of teams, however, still lose money for their schools.12
But even if sports is not a spectacularly good investment for most schools, it’s still a spectacle. College sports has become a viable replacement product for the professional leagues, and plenty of fans even prefer it. Vegas is happy to take bets, even though most of the players aren’t old enough to walk into a casino. March Madness has become the most gambled-on sports event in the country, according to the American Gaming Association.13 You might think underfunded public schools wouldn’t be able to compete with big-money private universities, but there’s not much difference when it comes to sports. Still, the scale of the business does mean schools are forced to wrestle for first-rate staff. The results are embarrassing: In thirty-nine states, the highest-paid public employee is a football or basketball coach. These salaries reach into the millions, buttressed by apparel endorsements and paid appearances. But even though labor compensation is astronomical when it comes to coaches and athletic directors, the NCAA has found an innovative way to keep labor costs down: It banned paying players.
Much like companies trying to get away with exploiting student labor, the NCAA invented its own category to dodge labor law. Like the intern loophole, the courts upheld “student-athlete” and exempted universities from all their responsibilities. Historian Taylor Branch examined the history of the legal term in his book-length essay The Cartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA. The Association’s lawyers first came up with the idea in the 1950s, in response to a death benefits claim by the widow of Ray Dennison. A scholarship player for the Fort Lewis A&M football team, Dennison died after an on-field head injury. Since he was a player for a public school’s team, Dennison’s widow believed she was due workers’ compensation. As Branch writes, the NCAA believed otherwise:
Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a “work-related” accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given the hundreds of incapacitating injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. Critically, the NCAA position was determined only by its member institutions—the colleges and universities, plus their athletic conferences—as students themselves have never possessed NCAA representation or a vote. Practical interest turned the NCAA vigorously against Dennison, and the Supreme Court of Colorado ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was “not in the football business.”14
It’s a brilliant use of the pedagogical mask: Student-athletes can’t be real athletes because they’re students first. Everyone knows this to be a fraud, but it’s easier to wink, nudge, and moralize than to contemplate the alternative: billions of dollars in labor costs. To keep the system in place, the NCAA has made a cardinal sin out of compensation. If schools are caught offering student-athletes anything above a scholarship—famously, the rules used to consider a bagel within bounds, but cream cheese a violation—the NCAA can take whatever action they please. Of course the Association isn’t looking to kill any golden geese by targeting star players, but if a college athlete’s future gets wrecked once in a while by a violation, that’s the cost of keeping the rest in line. There’s no law that bans paying a kid to come to your school, but the NCAA has attached the purity of amateur athletics to the idea that the players are uncompensated. What’s closer to the truth is that the NCAA is fighting for survival. The minute universities start competing with each other for prospective players with cash on an open market is also the official time of death for college sports. That’s why Branch calls the NCAA a cartel: Universities collude not to compete, and they all profit by keeping the labor cost low. It’s a big scam, and it can’t last.
What the NCAA can’t admit is that they’re a multibillion-dollar industry based on the unpaid labor of young athletes who have already spent years working incredibly hard just to get on the field. And just like their peers in finance, once the lucky few make it, they have earned a chance to do a whole lot more work. A 2010 NCAA survey found that—though rules state that coaches are only supposed to prevail upon their charges for twenty hours a week—student-athletes report regularly spending thirty to forty hours a week on their sports.15 For Division I athletes, college sports is a full-time unpaid job, and a difficult one at that. In an open market, teams have to shell out sizable salaries for this kind of athletic labor, and the stars can’t play by themselves; leagues need to pay for complete rosters even if the third-string catcher isn’t exactly bringing in the crowds. The full amount the NCAA allows athletes doesn’t approach what they’re worth, no matter how fancy their school. In fact, it doesn’t cover their expenses.
A study by the National College Players Association and Drexel University Department of Sport Management of the 2011–12 season looked at the top ten college basketball and football programs and found that “full-ride” student-athletes lived below the poverty line in seventeen of twenty programs.16 Players on all twenty teams endured expenses of up to $6,904 above and beyond their scholarship. The same study estimated that if NCAA teams were forced to compete for players in cash, Division I football and basketball players would be worth $137,357 and $289,031 a year, respectively—not including endorsements and the gifts fans and boosters would no doubt shower upon student-athletes if they were allowed the chance to do so within the rules.17 Some huge shortfalls are revealed in the study: Louisville basketball players received scholarships worth $17,370, which left them $3,730 below the poverty line. Meanwhile, the study’s authors calculate a Louisville player’s 2011–12 market value at over $1.6 million. Over four years, a University of Texas football player will not only miss out on $2.2 million in wages, he’ll pay $14,500 above his scholarship for the privilege.18 Coaches and schools get paid while players get worked; the system is manifestly exploitative. The only defense the NCAA can muster is that the players are students and students don’t get paid.
When former UCLA power forward Ed O’Bannon filed a lawsuit against the NCAA and the video game maker Electronic Arts, he took a stand against the abuse of the student-athlete category. At the heart of the case—a class-action suit on behalf of Division I men’s basketball and football players—was whether the NCAA can profit off the use of former players’ likenesses without compensating them. O’Bannon can pick up a controller and play as himself in the EA college basketball game, but he had been required to permanently allow UCLA and the NCAA to license his image for free when he started playing. O’Bannon claimed a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act: that the NCAA was unreasonably restricting trade by colluding to prevent players from licensing their likeness in a competitive environment. (EA quickly settled their part of the suit out of court for $40 million.) The NCAA claimed that schools field teams not for cash or prestige but because of their “commitment to amateurism,” and these institutions would rather quit than violate the sanctity of not paying players.19 The association argued that they couldn’t be price-setting because what they’re selling is education—they’re “not in the football business”—and scholarship players pay close to nothing. How can they be price-setting if they don’t charge anything? How can they compete any further if they’ve already gone all the way to zero?
In her ruling for the plaintiffs, federal judge Claudia Wilken found the NCAA unconvincing. She not only ruled that the NCAA was unreasonably restraining trade, she upended their whole conception of the athlete-school relationship. Instead of believing the story about generous schools bestowing their product on worthy amateurs for free, Wilken recognized that the relationship between universities and their players isn’t one-way. She found that while many Division I football and basketball players do not pay for tuition, room, or board in a traditional sense, “they nevertheless provide their schools with something of significant value: their athletic services and the rights to use their names, images, and likenesses while they are enrolled.”20 This is a big problem for the NCAA. If student-athletes start removing the pedagogical mask and thinking of themselves as sellers of labor, they’re liable to start acting like it. Judge Wilken noted that, in the absence of the NCAA “cartel,” schools would undoubtedly offer the recruits for whom they compete most aggressively a share of the cash they generate.21 Schools have engaged in anticompetitive practices in order to push the costs of competition on student-athletes and the kids who want to become them.
There’s so much money in college sports that it has begun to look obscene to compensate players as little as the Association allows. The NCAA and an additional near two hundred schools funnel merchandise licensing through the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC), which reported $4.62 billion in sales in 2012, driven by huge gains in women’s apparel.22 And despite the NCAA’s shaky foundations, schools have kept adding teams. The National Football Foundation reported that the number of (highly capital-intensive) college football teams grew a steady 35 percent between 1978 and 2012.23 The NCAA reported a record 463,000 student-athletes participating in 2012–13.24 University business managers aren’t the only ones who see what’s going on. When asked about pay for student-athletes before the 2014 Final Four championship, University of Connecticut star Shabazz Napier told the assembled media, “Sometimes, there’s hungry nights where I’m not able to eat, but I still gotta play up to my capabilities…. I don’t see myself so much as an employee, but when you see a jersey getting sold…you want something in return.” Shamed on the eve of their big night, the NCAA reversed the policy that limited student-athlete meals only a week later. As legal, political, and social attention focuses on the NCAA’s mistreatment of student-athletes, the latter have begun to organize themselves to do more than win games.
The National College Players Association has existed for over a decade, but the organization gained prominence and authority as the controversy grew. During the 2013 college football season, the NCPA organized conference calls with players across the country, and, citing a number of grievances—including the threat of concussions, support for the O’Bannon case, and the need for general Association reform—players wrote “APU” (“All Players United”) on their wrist tape. With the O’Bannon victory, student-athletes present and past have won more than just momentum: To pursue the case, NCAA Division I football and basketball players had to be certified as a class, a barrier many commentators feared they wouldn’t be able to clear. Judge Wilken’s ruling sets the stage for further litigation, including the nightmare scenario: A Fair Labor Standards Act class action on behalf of even a small number of highly profitable former college athletes for back wages could lay waste to the concept of amateurism and push the NCAA into the historical abyss.
College sports make a lot of the issues raised in this book so far more tangible. Kids compete against a growing number of their classmates for a few high-value slots. The NCAA figures that under 4 percent of high school basketball players and around 7 percent of football and baseball players will go on to college ball.25 Years of heightened competition have increased the amount of skill and capability—we call that human capital, remember—required to make it, compelling would-be student-athletes to work longer and harder. And for the rare few who do get there, what most of them have won is a handful of years with more hard work that goes unrewarded. Outside baseball, with its extensive minor league system, as well as basketball and hockey with their international leagues, less than 2 percent of NCAA student-athletes will advance to the professional level. The other 98+ percent won’t see a dime from sports, even though they too worked hard enough to be in the top 5 percent or so of high school players.26 The labor that goes into star athletes doesn’t just come from them or their coaches, trainers, consultants, or parents. The competition from the other 99.9 percent of players allows them to be great, but in a winner-take-all system devoted to cutting labor costs, there’s more money for profiteers and the institutions that employ them if that work goes uncounted and unpaid. The pedagogical mask is an all-purpose tool for discounting young people’s labor, and it’s all the NCAA has left to hide behind.
The entertainment world is, at first glance, different: It’s one of the few places where young people’s work is recognized as work in a traditional sense. When a child actor walks on set or a teen pop star jumps in the studio, they’re engaged in plain old labor, for which their employers have to pay market rate. Though custodial laws have led to some notable parent-child confrontations over who gets to control the money, from an employer’s perspective, it’s not necessarily any cheaper than hiring fully grown adult performers. Unlike in sports, there’s no rule that restricts young entertainers from competing for wages and against adults. But this doesn’t mean that young workers in the pop media industries are exempt from the structural shifts that affect their peers. Like young athletes, musicians, actors, and social media stars all give us insight into the broader changes in the lives of the rest of us nonsinging, nondancing, nonfamous young people.
One of the best analyses of how the entertainment world has changed for young artists in recent years comes from one of those artists herself: Taylor Swift. In July of 2014, Swift wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about shifts in how media gets made, distributed, and bought. The biggest and most dramatic difference between now and ten or fifteen years ago is digitization and the end of scarcity. Art that’s reproducible has always lent itself to unauthorized copying—pirates even made bootleg copies of Shakespeare’s plays—but each succeeding wave of recording and distribution technologies has made it easier. Tapes meant you could record songs off the radio, VHS meant you could record shows and movies. But everything solid melts into the cloud, and digitization means media can be copied without degrading and without limits on quantity. A file is a file is a file. Various file-sharing services—from Napster to LimeWire to Kazaa to The Pirate Bay—have made it nearly costless for nearly anyone to download or stream nearly anything. The futuristic fantasy of free access to every song, movie, game, and TV episode is more or less here.
One group that’s not enjoying the total proliferation of all media is the recording industry. Swift’s article quotes the Recording Industry Association of America’s figures, which show the revenue from music sales declining by more than half between 2003 and 2013, from $15 to $7 billion annually. At the beginning of the new century, physical recorded media (CDs and tapes) accounted for over 95 percent of revenue; by 2013 it was down to 35 percent. In revenue for physical media, that’s a decline of over $10 billion in a decade. This has meant heightened competition between professional and would-be professional artists. As Swift puts it, “It isn’t as easy today as it was twenty years ago to have a multiplatinum-selling album.”27 And it isn’t just unauthorized copying that has boosted competition; the same file-sharing sites host pirated recording and editing software too. It’s easier than ever to create and distribute professional-caliber media: You don’t even have to pay for the tools you need to create what used to be called a demo. This is the unpaid work of applying for gigs that’s increasing across the board, and artists are particularly susceptible. Firms have shifted the costs of human capital development onto workers; artists are no exception. Artists can no longer wait even into their teens for a label or a studio to make them into a star, not when they’re competing with peers who are willing to use whatever tools they can get their hands on to wedge themselves into the few A-list slots.
It’s not just pop musicians who are fighting from childhood for the starring role. In her study of young violinists, Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos, sociologist Izabela Wagner looks at how a field of small children playing instruments nearly as big as they are narrows to a tiny class of professional soloists. Star violinists have always started young, but the age at which they take up the instrument has decreased: In Wagner’s observation group of nearly 100, 79 percent began their studies before the age of seven. The author describes the feat of becoming an international soloist who starts the violin after age eight as “nearly impossible.” And even if you do start on time, that’s far from a guarantee. Here’s how one of Wagner’s interviewees describes the odds of success: “For every ten students, one will attempt suicide, one will become mentally ill, two will become alcoholics, two will slam doors and jettison the violin out the window, three will work as violinists, and perhaps one will become a soloist.”28 Those are not good numbers, but there’s always hope for that one spot. Until there’s not.
Elite violinists (and other classical musicians) have always started young, but the Millennial cohort has had to compete with a different, bigger talent pool. Classical music has been popular in Japan since the 1960s, but China didn’t pick it up until the late 1970s—Wagner dates it to Yehudi Menuhin’s visit in 1979, which was also when talented Chinese violinists were first allowed to travel outside the country for study and competition. Until recently, the top ranks had been dominated by Eastern European émigrés and their children, particularly Jewish ones. (The violin was a way for families to escape the ghetto; stakes have been high.) But globalization has heightened the level of competition and proved there’s no ethnic magic that makes for expert musicians. At the 2016 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists, the top four spots in the senior competition belonged to artists from China and South Korea. Wagner’s tally has only 3 percent of high-level young competitors born in the United States, and 0 percent of finalists. But that doesn’t stop some families from trying.
Because of the low start age and the high level of initial investment required, violin is for intensive parents only. Accumulating a professional-sized amount of human capital by age fifteen is incredibly hard work, and pretty much no child can do it without a firm hand and constant supervision. It’s a situation where multiple adults (parents, teachers, supporters) are piling their time, energy, and money directly into a single kid. It’s a lot of work for everyone involved, and with the extremely long odds and long hours, it all looks like a long con. And for a lot of kids and parents, it is; one top-level teacher is open with Wagner about the practice of using money from the parents of the less talented to support the training of less wealthy, more talented students. And yet everyone keeps playing their part.
Wagner explains why parents are willing to endure the screaming and tears that come with entering the violin prodigy contest:
According to my observations, parents in all categories tend to believe that their child’s talent will enable them to prevail in the struggle that is the consequence of a saturated market. This conviction is shared by others in the direct environment of young soloists. The “aura” of a “talented child” mobilized the parents to pursue the path indicated by the teacher in the first stage of education. At that moment, and beyond, these expressions meant that their child had the potential to become a soloist.
If you dangle in front of parents the kind of 1 percent life outcome that goes with being a star, some of them will grab for it, even if objectively it’s not a very good plan for their child’s long-term wellbeing. Once a parent hears that their kid might have potential—as a painter, a dancer, a tennis player, a musician, whatever—all the stories of struggling artists and washed-up athletes fade to the background. At a certain point the student will have to be accountable to themselves for their own training, and that psychological discipline is one of the hardest things about making a true prodigy. Telling a child they’re specially talented in a narrow way from such a young age has an impact on their self-perception, and the kids themselves have unrealistic ideas about their prospects. It’s the champions and soloists everyone thinks about, not the much larger group of also-rans.
Young violinists who clear the first few big hurdles don’t get to sit down and take a break. Or at least not a very long one. This is one soloist student’s schedule:
8:30–9:30, French; 9:40–10:40, violin practice (scales, open strings, studies); 10:40–11:10, break; 11:10–12:10, mathematics; 12:10–1:30, lunch; 1:30–2:30, violin practice (pieces); 2:30–2:45, break; 2:45–3:30 history (or geography or natural science); 3:30–4:00, snack break; 4:00–5:00, violin (pieces, sight-reading); 5:30, dance lessons (or theory of music or choir); 7:30–9:00, dinner and free time.
Break times are laid out by the student. Free time is devoted to a short walk, book reading, dancing, and educational computer games. On Wednesday and Saturday, the student goes with a parent to take violin lessons….Sunday is a free day, with “only” three hours of violin practice.29
The student in question is an eleven-year-old boy. Reading through his weekly agenda, it’s obvious this is a work schedule. That kid is fiddling his little butt off every day, and he has to if he (and his adult teachers and assistants) want a shot at the one soloist spot. If he finds a way to skip a day, he can be sure that one of his competitors didn’t. Musicality and talent are important for success, but there are a lot of other variables. A reasonable observer starts to wonder whether there’s room for a therapy appointment in that schedule, or at least a damn playdate.
Most of us Millennials don’t spend our childhoods training to become professional entertainers, and most of the ones who do attempt it drop out before they have to put all their eggs in a single basket. But the same patterns of work and competition that exist among elite young violinists exist at a less intense level among kids who are just hoping to get good enough jobs to live in security and peace. Everyone works, a few get paid.
There is a lot of drama in that experience, and during the Millennial lifetime an entire new category of marketing and entertainment has emerged around adolescence. Kids have even become the stars of their own workplace comedies, and a target consumer group as well.
In the early 1990s, The Mickey Mouse Club—a kids’ variety show that served as Disney’s minor league system—prepared and screened a string of future stars, including JC Chasez, Keri Russell, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling, Britney Spears, and Justin Timberlake. With its skits, music videos, and live performances, the Club was a perfect course in pop-star training. As in college sports, stars-in-training attracted their own audiences. Chasing a wave of (highly leveraged) consumer spending, media and advertising companies set about creating the “tween” market. The demographic doesn’t really refer to an age range; it refers to children with consumer choice.
In her book Tweening the Girl: The Crystallization of the Tween Market, Natalie Coulter dates the term’s beginning to the formation of the Spice Girls in 1994.30 Contradicting the classic idea we have about how music groups come to be, the Spice Girls were the product of a music management team who saw an opportunity to compete with popular boy bands. They placed a casting call in a trade magazine, and through rigorous competition among hundreds of young women, they picked five—making the group far more selective than Harvard or Yale. The Spice Girls were a worldwide success, drawing comparisons with the Beatles. But the Girls and their managers were better prepared to capitalize than Ringo and Co. had been, with new levels of branded merchandise and a full-length feature film (Spice World). Along with the success of Mouseketeer veterans, the Spice Girls represented a Marinovich moment for pop entertainment: Success could be built from the ground up.
Coulter traces the tween star lineage from the Spice Girls through the VHS star Olsen twins and Disney Channel original programming leads Hilary Duff and Miley Cyrus. Like the products of increasingly sophisticated experiments, these stars developed into better and better investments. There’s of course some risk in putting so much into performers who are so young, but generally speaking, during this period the advantages of building a star from the bottom up started to outweigh the risks. This sounds cost-intensive compared to running ads against YouTube videos (it is—more on that soon), but at the time, media conglomerates were dealing with a whole new market and product line. And the tweens were a gold mine.
Disney wasn’t the only company that saw an opportunity; Nickelodeon (a sub-brand of the parent company Viacom) ran ten seasons of a Millennial kids sketch comedy show called All That between 1994 and 2005. It was very goofy but produced a couple of enduring jokes. Original cast members Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell spun off a sketch about a dysfunctional fast-food joint into the movie Good Burger, and Nickelodeon gave the two of them their own comedy show, Kenan & Kel. The network followed suit with All That vet Amanda Bynes and her spin-off, The Amanda Show. Bynes went on to star in a couple of Hollywood teen flicks before transitioning to tabloid scandals full-time.
Of the thirty or so kids who performed on All That, most haven’t had huge careers. The acting equivalent of a lucky-but-not-luckiest gig as a “working violinist” (from the Wagner book) seems to be a recurring supporting role in a TV show that lasts for a few seasons at least. Kenan Thompson has been the best long-term investment. He moved up from the minors to the majors and is (at the time of this writing) the longest-serving cast member in the history of Saturday Night Live, already fourteen years in at the young age of thirty-eight. But when he joined up at twenty-four, Thompson already had eight years’ experience doing televised comedy for a national audience. His partner Mitchell didn’t make the cut. Thompson was the first SNL player to have starred in a kids’ show, but I’m willing to bet he won’t be the last.
Miley Cyrus represents a real achievement for the tween industry. A signed television lead at twelve, Cyrus was a hit with Hannah Montana (itself about a tween star), garnering the Disney Channel its largest audience ever.31 And she wasn’t just an actress: Cyrus released her first studio album at fourteen, and if they made a plastic product, you could buy it with her face on it. Miley is one in a million, and Disney wanted to make sure they didn’t miss the payout. She was the first artist to sign deals in TV, film, music, and consumer products with Disney.32 Between her 2010 album Can’t Be Tamed and 2013’s Bangerz, Cyrus landed what everyone else so far had failed to: a seamless transition from tween star to teen pop sensation to mainstream A-lister. Not far behind her was Ariana Grande, star of Nickelodeon’s Sam & Cat, whose 2013 album Yours Truly debuted at number one on the Billboard charts.33 It appears the large media companies have concocted a formula for success so strong that they feel comfortable investing millions of dollars to develop a small number of child performers. At least, they did. Now the kids can do a lot of that investing on their own.
Just as the rationalized star machine really came into its own, the earth began to shake beneath its feet. Even though they have helped shrink the recording industry, free platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud provide large media organizations with some obvious benefits. They filter talent and help shift the costs of developing human capital off their corporate plates. But the breakdown of the division between amateur and professional in such spaces also means the pros have to compete with the kids at home. Free platforms are changing more than just the production and distribution of content; they’re having a huge effect on the form. In an August 2014 survey by Variety, fifteen hundred American teens were asked to rank twenty celebrities based on their favorable attributes; ten of the celebrities were the best-known Hollywood stars, according to the marketing analysis firm Q Scores, while the other half were popular YouTube personalities. The results weren’t even close: YouTubers occupied the top five slots. Most people over the age of eighteen (myself very much included) would be surprised that Jennifer Lawrence was less popular than Ryan Higa, PewDiePie, and the comedy duo Smosh, and this signals a deep generational gulf in the way we consume (and produce) entertainment.34
Platforms that entice users to post their own content are popular to the degree that people feel compelled to use them. The most successful digital platforms are thus the ones that are suited to the kind of content with the lowest production costs. Even though there are many emerging platforms for distributing full-length movies, it still takes a lot of time and money and people to put together a feature film. YouTube videos, on the other hand, have a production and distribution cost of virtually nothing. As a result, all sorts of new forms of short video have flooded the Internet, from makeup tutorials to “haul videos” in which shoppers empty their bags piece by piece for their webcam. There are pimple-popping videos, nonerotic whispering videos, drug-use instructional videos, and a series where a young woman smashes bread products with her face. Every month or two a new “challenge” goes viral and people around the country perform variations on frozen tableaus or dump ice buckets on their heads or what have you. Now you can just watch the Internet instead of television, jumping from one amateur performance to the next. Younger Millennials have grown up with high-speed connections, and a whole virtual world of jokes and other content is just clicks away, an experience that is both inspiring and intimidating.
There is a lot of space for imagination, and YouTube, unlike labels and studios that have historically invested in particular performers, has little to gain from limiting the flow of new ideas and faces. Gradually, YouTube has turned itself into more than a platform, by sharing some ad revenue with its bigger stars and promoting their shows with traditional advertising. There are some YouTube millionaires, but the company only has to pay for success. The corporate risk is minimal, as the costs (to build a brand identity, foster an audience, and promote the content—all in addition to actually creating it) mostly fall to the creators themselves. It’s no wonder Hollywood is having trouble keeping up: Julia Roberts just had to beat Meg Ryan; Jennifer Lawrence has to compete with every teenager in the country.
Until very recently, it was still common to talk about labels and studios foisting brands upon young and talented artists. This is the classic complaint of the grunge era: The corporate Man wants your rare talent or sound or energy, but he wants to remake your image, to sand off your edges and put you in a market-friendly package. As in other industries, the recruitment process has become a lot easier (cheaper) for employers and a lot more expensive for would-be employees. A demo with a new sound or a solid audition isn’t good enough. Artists are now expected to arrive with a market-ready brand and audience, saving their corporate overlords the makeover expense. Building a brand is no longer the purview of slick besuited experts; it’s the individual responsibility of every voice that wants to “make it.” “The question is no longer IF you have a personal brand,” Shama Hyder writes for Forbes, “but if you choose to guide and cultivate the brand or to let it be defined on your behalf.”35 In her article “7 Things You Can Do to Build an Awesome Personal Brand,” Hyder lists tricks like “Audit your online presence,” “Find ways to produce value,” “Be purposeful in what you share,” and “Associate with other strong brands.” It’s a lot of work, and it’s work that firms would otherwise have to pay for, risks they would otherwise have to take. Instead, they get to cherry-pick from among a whole Internet of complete packages.
The best way for artists to make it to the next level—besides skilled brand management—is to do as much of the label’s or network’s or publisher’s or gallery’s work for them as possible. That means cultivating a fan base and producing professional-quality content, from albums to music videos to entire TV series. Platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud allow artists to upload and distribute their work for free, but they also automatically enter them in the world’s largest talent-search reality contest. After all, it’s where they found Justin Bieber. Why should a firm bother taking a chance on an unknown when there are relatively proven but unsigned acts littering the Internet? “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around,” Taylor Swift concludes.36 That future is already here, as Swift tells the story of a casting director choosing between two actresses based on which had more Twitter followers. Older Americans like to complain about the way many young people obsessively track our own social media metrics, but it’s a complaint that’s totally detached from the behavior’s historical, material causes. As the Forbes article makes clear, personal branding shifts work onto job-seekers.
Take the case of Chief Keef. The Chicago rapper made XXL’s list of the hottest freshman artists in 2013 before he hit eighteen, but in today’s culture industry, no one’s really a rookie at eighteen. Before he made the list, Keef had already released over forty of his own songs for free online. At sixteen, he created a whole record label in waiting (what would become formalized as Glory Boyz Entertainment), to which he “signed” his friends and released their free tapes as well. Together they produced beats, wrote songs, recorded them, shot and edited videos, designed mixtape covers, and promoted their work—all without corporate oversight, assistance, or financing. By the time Interscope signed Keef, he was already a bona fide star, with the kind of brand they would have otherwise had to spend money developing. And even if they had bankrolled Keef’s rise, Interscope would have been taking a big chance on an artist who might or might not have resonated with the public. An “unknown” is a much better bet when they’ve already earned themselves a million YouTube hits. Interscope got the best of all worlds: a proven hit single in “I Don’t Like” (already remixed by Kanye), and a prebuilt subsidiary in Glory Boyz. But that wasn’t enough: Interscope was able to put a condition on Keef’s blockbuster contract: If his debut album didn’t sell 250,000 copies, the multialbum deal was off. The label is able to offload nearly all the risk onto the artists—in this case, a teenager and his friends. Despite the debut Finally Rich having hit its numbers—Keef claimed he made $100,000 per song on the twelve-track album—Interscope dropped Keef in October of 2014.
On the production side of music, technological advancement has made an even bigger difference. In the 1990s and the aughts, the biggest acts used songwriter/producers like Sweden’s Max Martin, who turned pop song creation from an art into a science. Rationalized electronic production allowed producers to adapt their sound to whatever artist walked through the door, and without having to worry too much about whether the public would like it or not. But as young artists have developed an intuitive understanding of how these producers construct songs and have been able to replicate and build on it with editing and production software, they have begun to compete with the professionals on their own turf. Some of the more bubblegum of marquee acts like Katy Perry and One Direction still use songwriter/producers like Martin and his countryman Rami Yacoub, but as the laptop has become America’s most popular new instrument, “DJ” has come to mean “electronic music composer,” and once-marginal techno is now mainstream electronic dance music—EDM for short. Just as YouTube videos have an advantage over Hollywood films, EDM is better suited to the present moment than, say, nineties-style alt-rock. It is now much cheaper in terms of manpower, equipment, space, and difficulty to make an electronic track than to record a rock song, which means it’s likely to be a more vibrant genre. That doesn’t necessarily make it better, but there are more people doing it, and the form evolves more quickly as a result.
On the rap side, the disparity between the number of would-be lyricists and trained, equipped producers is decreasing. Much like their peers stuck in school or out on the practice field, the new breed of producer is, well, very productive. In 2011, the New York Times profiled then-twenty-year-old Lex Luger, who helped define what producers could do in this new environment. Starting in high school and armed with a laptop and a program called Fruity Loops, Luger created some of the most influential beats in contemporary rap. As he demonstrated to Times reporter Alex Pappademas, Luger can make one of these market-ready beats in under twenty minutes.37 It’s nearly impossible for labels to keep up with a world of amateurs all releasing music as fast as they can create it. The availability of programs like Fruity Loops opened up a whole new medium for kids. “If you didn’t work in a major recording studio, you couldn’t just be a kid that liked making beats, it didn’t work like that,” Mikey Rocks of the hip-hop duo the Cool Kids told Fader magazine. “Then Fruity Loops came and the Internet started cracking where you could get shit for free. Once you could download it, it was like, Let’s go.”38 The means of beat production are now better distributed, and everyone who listens to music benefits. But those artists making the music aren’t always so lucky.
For every Chief Keef or Luger, there are a hundred, a thousand kids doing similar work without hitting it big. The breakdown of what economists call “barriers to entry”—in this case, the costs of recording, editing, distributing, and promoting—means more people can make and publish more content. This is good for anyone who wants access to creative work unmediated by bigwigs in suits, but it’s a boon for those suits too. Free distribution platforms level the distinctions between professional and amateur and allow the latter to pitch themselves to fans and labels. Online platforms don’t compensate everyone who uploads their work, but that doesn’t mean the owners can’t profit. Estimates put YouTube’s value at $70 billion. Even though this new production/distribution arrangement has shrunk the recording industry and allows consumers to access nearly anything they want on demand for free, it still isn’t bad for corporations. It’s just good for different corporations.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to music; comedians are another group of content creators who face a similar situation. The Comedy Central series Broad City, for example, ran for years on YouTube before the network snatched it up. Nickelodeon’s tween-defining Kids’ Choice Awards now has a category for social media performers. Kenan Thompson’s level of experience was unprecedented for someone of his age when he auditioned for Saturday Night Live, but nowadays fifteen (the age at which he started acting) is late to get started making jokes online if you’re hoping to go pro someday. But rap is still the best example. Forbes called free mixtapes “the ultimate advertisement,” even though advertising isn’t a cost that’s traditionally borne by artists themselves.39 If labels were still responsible, there’s no way they could afford to pay for all these full-length promotional tapes. There’s probably not a chance that networks would pay for a series or a writer to develop for years in the minor leagues and find an audience before giving them airtime. Flipping through the mixtapes on a site like DatPiff, it’s hard to wrap your head around just how much work went into all of it. Hosting platforms make millions off the ads they run next to the content, and media companies save money by letting artists compete to get noticed, but the average artist ends up giving away more in exchange for less.
For this to work, artists have to be able to bear the costs. In the old story about a band becoming successful, they scrape, borrow, and steal to afford studio recording time and audio engineers so that they can transform their inspiration into some semblance of a viable product. Then, when they get their demo into the right hands, the label pays for slick design, overwrought marketing copy, collaborations with more established artists, and music videos. But with the barriers to entry falling, a band or an artist can do all of this on their own. A garage is more than a practice space; now it’s a recording and design studio. And teens don’t need any special training to pirate music, video, or image-editing software, and these days they can access a lot of it (or open-source versions) legitimately for free. From there, learning is a question of practice and determination, qualities every aspect of Millennial life demands already. It’s easier today for young people to make and distribute art, and according to the formula we’ve observed so far, that means they’re going to shoulder a greater portion of the production costs.
The trends we’ve seen in this chapter affect us all as consumers and increasingly as producers. Declining labor costs change life for players from the sandlot to the majors, and for entertainers from the bedroom to the top of the charts. Because of their more visible labor, these celebs (and the amateurs who wouldn’t mind joining them) offer insight into the changes that touch all Americans and shape the Millennial character. There are positives and negatives for individual creators, but in the aggregate, the trends from the labor market in general apply to these famous workers as well. Technological development leads to increased worker productivity, declining labor costs, more competition, a shift in the costs of human capital development onto individual competitors, and increased productivity all over again. Millennials are the historical embodiment of this cycle run amok, run off the rails, and we can watch the wreckage for free on YouTube after a thirty-second ad.