Originally published on July 26, 2002
To this day, I can recall the words of an old friend spoken to me 13 years ago: Will, you have to do something creative with your life.”
I have written poetry, a few magazine articles, and one screenplay. Not much has come of my efforts. I have tons of reasons why I haven’t made it big, but I’m going to discuss one of my pet peeves: barriers to entry.
A “barrier to entry” is an economic concept defined by the Dictionary of Regulatory Terms as “economic, political or technical factors which prevent or make it difficult for firms to enter a market and compete with existing suppliers.” The most obvious barrier to entry for wannabe artists is money.
For example, I’ve been told that I have a great voice and asked if I was either a singer or in radio. Recently, I attended an informational session on the voice work industry. One of the first points the instructor made was that having a good voice isn’t enough to succeed. One needs voice training in order to “apply” one’s voice to the requests made by the advertising industry. Training isn’t free.
I’ve also thought about filmmaking. With the advent of digital filmmaking, the barrier to entry has lowered, but we’re still talking thousands of dollars to shoot, process and market a film.
This is why I love the World Wide Web. If you’re reading this, you either own a computer or have access to one. Blogging costs as much or as little as you want. I chose to register a domain name and to pay for web hosting, but those aren’t prerequesites to blogging.
The barrier to entry to the music world is being lowered. Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata discusses this quote by Eric Olsen:
The parallels between music-creation software and blogging are unmistakable: both enable “ordinary people” to enter into areas of creativity and, equally important, distribution, that were only previously available to select professionals: those who were allowed to pass through the portals of either the press or the record labels by the guardians at the gates. By enabling a large number of people to engage in these activities, both technologies are democratizing their respective fields and battering the barriers between “creator” and “consumer” in both directions.
You and I, with a little help from software like Acid Pro, can do what rappers and electronic musicians have been doing for years: create music cheaply and quickly.
What technology will further reduce the entry fee to filmmaking?
Will Leon 