Hopping Off The Train

The signs are everywhere: a move from mega to micro among creatives

I don’t love the term “content creation” because it calls to mind a stoker shoveling coal endlessly into a steam engine to keep the train barreling down the track, but here we are.

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We’ve been in a golden age in terms of audience access to creative output at relatively low cost for the last decade and a half. The dawn of the streaming era saw studios throwing so much money into shows, limited series, straight-to-streaming movies, and we’ve been treated to a feast of storytelling. Shovel shovel chug chug: I May Destroy You. Succession. Fleabag. Breaking Bad. Mad Men. Inventing Anna. OITNB. Bridgerton. Severance. The Bear. The list goes on. It would take me another decade to catch up with it all.

In the theaters, we still had plenty of blockbusters. Marvel and DC Comics superhero sagas for fans of CGI SFX, and award-worthy performances in films I’m still thinking about: Women Talking. Parasite. Nomadland. Get Out. And the amazing Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Broadway entered the Hamilton era. Next thing you know, you can stream it on Disney+ along with The Eras Tour. The “jukebox musical” trend is still going strong, with theatergoers wanting a sure thing for their ticket price missing out on newer work and newer voices that represent a higher risk for producers.

Napster and then Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime, YouTube, SoundCloud etc created a situation that turned the music industry business model upside down, inside out and then some. It’s estimated that across all platforms, 100,000 songs are uploaded per day right now. Rather than touring to promote album sales, artists are giving away their music hoping people will buy tickets to their tour.

And my industry, audiobooks, has seen double digit growth in terms of both units sold and gross revenue earned for over a decade now. During COVID lockdowns, a whole new generation of narrators arrived. Some were professional actors with nowhere else to work, while others were book lovers with a dream who decided to give it a go.

The growth in work opportunities across the entertainment industry meant that creators could also pursue passion projects, some of which really went somewhere. Hop the train, take a ride: Put your short film on Vimeo. Start a true crime podcast. Write a book, upload it to Kindle just so your grandma can read it and bam, you’re Colleen Hoover.

Alongside and intertwined with this boom in the entertainment industry was a parallel boom in the number of people creating influencer brands on social media platforms. We’ve spend the last decade and a half creating audiences on all the sites, and those audiences carry tremendous value for artists. Actors find that the size of their social media audience can be a tie breaker in the casting process. Authors have learned that one BookToker can land their book on the front table at Barnes & Noble and get them a Bestseller flag on the ‘zon.

It’s been an amazing ride, no doubt. But at times it felt like all the coal shoveling was making us go too fast. The landscape flew past in a blur, and what’s that up ahead, around the corner? A bridge? A tunnel?

A cliff? (Now I’m thinking of that incredible scene in the last Mission: Impossible) Yikes.

The whole entertainment industry seems poised for a slowdown. Post-lockdowns, long-established arts institutions are struggling. Theater companies are closing. Movie studios and streamers are drastically scaling down the pace of production. YouTubers are quitting, claiming burnout. Film and TV writers, performers and crew pulled the brakes last year, striking for better pay and working conditions, the specter of AI looming in the background. Writers who fell into a book-a-month release cycle are re-assessing the sustainability of such a frenzied pace.

In audiobook land, established narrators are feeling increased competition and downward pressure on pay rates, and seeing ominous blank space in their recording schedules where the main concern, previously, was burnout from overwork. AI voices are now well established in audiobook production, with 40,000 Virtual Voice titles available on Audible.

And social media, for all it has given us, is more toxic than ever. I was on TikTok for about a month and it was like the Autobahn: if you can see it in the rearview, move over now or it’ll run right over you. Someone would be named, shamed, canceled and forgotten between my morning coffee and my evening glass of wine. It was terrifying. BookTok turned Colleen Hoover into an international publishing juggernaut, but she’s had to pull back for the sake of her mental health. This year is her last Book Bonanza too, and it looks like the days of the mega book event (especially after the Readers Take Denver apocalypse) may be numbered.

WHAT NOW?

Increasingly, the artists and writers whose voices I value most are putting down the coal shovel, stepping off the train, saying “no thanks, I’ll walk for a bit.” That feels right.

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I need a minute. To breathe, to think, to just be. I see news of actors and writers gravitating to off-off-Broadway theaters, tiny impromptu spaces, creating viscerally exciting new work, and I think: how refreshing, how freeing, to make room for play, for the creative process. Music-wise, yeah I’d like to see The Eras Tour but I also love to see musicians playing tiny clubs, house concerts, small festivals. Earlier this week I went to a lovely book event that probably had about 50 attendees in all, including authors. We had time for a long lunch, a walk, conversations about writing and publishing, and mixing and mingling at an early-evening reception, and I met some really solid folks I hope to keep in touch with.

I want small, even micro, in-person, private events that are barely on social media if at all. Maybe you do too. A small dinner party. A book club gathering. A mini-retreat. A reading at an independent bookstore. A busker on the street corner with an impromptu crowd gathered. A walk with just one friend.

Maybe part of this, for me, is just where I am in life. My husband is retired and making that phase of life look awfully tempting, though I’m a decade away still (he’s 15 years older). I still love traveling for work but I don’t need it the way I used to. There are places I want to go that have nothing to do with work, and I love our home so much I can go days without getting in a car. Lockdowns taught many of us that we were just go-go-going for its own sake.

Creatively, I am still hopelessly in love with narrating audiobooks and I hope that it is ultimately my decision, not the industry’s, to stop or slow down. I’ve had promising interest in my writing and am working on a couple of book ideas (not that it makes me all that unusual these days). But there are other things I’m interested in doing that scratch my creative itch too, like gardening, even messing around with art and wearables made from old books. I wouldn’t mind doing a play again someday.

I’ve felt this shift for a while now. Three years ago I founded an online community for established audiobook narrators, where we talk shop, share opportunities and hone our performance skills in very small groups led by some of the best in the industry, in terms of both narration and teaching skills. Interest has grown steadily, with some offerings now filling in literal minutes after an email announcement. Our Palm Springs Retreat, hosted with fellow narrator and dear friend Ron Butler, brings just a dozen narrators together, chosen via an application process, for a weekend of relaxed conversation and introspection, genuine connection and discovery. This summer my Voice for Narrators retreat will have even fewer than that, by design. As a coach, I still have plenty of people booking 1:1 sessions to get into their biggest most vulnerable questions.

Back when narrator.life started, I thought people would want self-study online courses. To learn on their own, at their convenience. But that assumption couldn’t have been more wrong. Our live events outsold our online courses by 50 to 1.

The narrators gravitating to the site want community above all. They want live interaction, to hear and be heard, to get feedback on their performances and their business challenges and their struggles with everything from discerning their casting niche to preventing burnout to differentiating between the voices in the scene with the ten dudes in a motorcycle club. And they want a community that is small enough that they can meet people they know, like, and trust.

So that’s what I’m banking on in the next little bit. Smaller, calmer, quieter, slower, more connected. And I am genuinely not worried about my fellow creatives. We know that as long as there are humans, there will always be art. There will always be music, dancing, storytelling, drawing and painting and sculpture and design, writing and acting and poetry. And just as we breathe in and breathe out, there will always be expansions and contractions, followed by a moment of rest and reset.