I mean they’re not all super rich but especially in the USA and especially with actors or TV personalities it seems like the well known ones make huge amounts of money. Just picking people at random and doing some searching online, apparently Scott Bakula got paid $120,000 for each episode of NCIS: New Orleans he was in which totalled over $18 million. Some sources say that Sarah Sherman, who’s been on SNL for 3 seasons, is worth around $4 million. Why do they get paid huge amounts of money when most people, even if they’re at the top of their industry, make a fraction of that?
Because mass media technology duplicates their work millions and millions of times over. If you think about how many end consumers get the product of their work, it will make more sense.
One reason entertainers actually manage to take home a sizable piece of this enormous pie is that they have strong unions. Important not to forget that. Because millions of wannabes would love to take Bakula’s place for nothing more than a living wage. The way they keep that from happening is good old fashioned labor solidarity and smart bargaining at every level of cast and production. I wish the entire economy were unionized as well as entertainment is. The world would be quite different.
The people in the arts who make lots of money are the exception, not the rule.
Yeah, do your community and yourself a favour and support local artists
Products that scale indefinitely to the masses earn indefinitely scaled pay as well. What’s far grosser is what the studios and their greedy CEOs earn off the backs of production staff who aren’t paid on the same model and are treated like props with no job security.
Most are not.
This is IMO the most awful stuff in these economy,
You have a couple of actors/singers who earn insane amount of money.
Then you have a large chunk who by mixing teaching, local theatre/bars, and some extra, get from a living wage, to a well-paid job.
And finally you have a majority who struggle.
All of that mostly based on being at the right place at the right time, and having the right friends
Well known entertainers lose all their privacy. I find that terrifying - it’s not just normal fans and being recognised everywhere they go - they attract wierdos, sometimes unsettling ones, sometimes dangerous ones. It’s ok to have a compensation high enough to be able to afford all the necessary safety measures for both themselves and their famillies.
Awe poor them, maybe they can cry into their fat wads of cash.
May they soothe the pain of something as awful and totally undesirable as fame. /s
Would you really like to be famous? With all the consequences, good and bad?
Uh, Yeah? Who tf wouldn’t lol. To be loved and adored by millions, to earn millions from that, it defies comprehension that some even have it that good.
When I had a YT of like 2k subs and had an OF thing going, I had weird dudes who spammed me their life stories in insta dms day in and day out, I admit - not the most pleasant interaction - it was still a helluva an ego boost.
Fame is generally an amazing thing desired by damn near everyone. You ever seen the kind of crazy shit people do for 5 seconds of it on TV? I could never, but maybe that’s my loss.
Well there are people like you who desire it and then there are people like me who wouldn’t want it ever, like no way. I understand the need of an ego boost in some people and also the desire for the status and money. But there are very many people with other values that hate the idea of being famous and don’t need any ego boosts. Many people just want to have a peaceful and comfortable nice little life with their privacy intact. Some of the people lusting for fame probably also just imagine the resirable parts of it and would be quite surprised about the bad parts.
I can’t imagine such a lack of ambition honestly.
Can confirm from experience. I’m a freelance performance artist. Typical community shows pay maybe $100-200, festivals can pay $1-2k but are harder to get and fuck you over in other ways. The real money is in corporate gigs and weddings, but those kill your spirit.
Here’s what it comes down to: negotiations based on how much money the industry makes from their work. Because without the artist, comedian, etc., their profits vanish.
Now understand that every worker in the world could realise the same thing. That’s what unions are for, having that weight to give the employees of a company leverage and ask for a bit more of the pie that wouldn’t exist without their work. Why do you think businesses fight unions so damn hard? Because it’s easier to distract or scare enough of a worker group, mostly compared to a single artist.
Being an influencer(or entertainer whatever) is like playing an incremental game. If you have 10 million fans and everyone pays you $1 you have 10 million dollars. The money is not about the art, it’s about how many people they can reach.
Influencers specially are just marketing reps for whose very pays.
And marketing has a lot of money
Because the people paying them think they’re going to earn it back.
When you are a well-known or household name, your presence alone can convince a lot of people to watch whatever product you’re in. Not just that, entertainment is inherently a risky business. Replacing unknowns with celebrities means reducing that risk, replacing it with known factors.
In other words, because the market thinks they’re worth it.
Firstly it’s a fraction of a percent of the pool of people working as entertainers that get paid anything close to a comfortable salary—many don’t even last a few years and make basically nothing before they change careers.
The successful ones get paid a load basically because the people that invest in funding TV shows & films know that you can generally multiply your investment by attaching a household name to the project. Now this is for several reasons, firstly a household name will generally actually be a good actor. Secondly, people recognising a member of your cast means they’re generally more likely to watch it. Finally, there’s the effect on the rest of the casting—some studios might take the opportunity to push the compensation of the “no-name” actors down because they have an opportunity to work with a star, others might go the other way and use the first star in negotiations to get additional starts signed on to the project.
So essentially, the big projects make a lot of money, and executives attribute a significant part of that generated value to having the big star involved, and so they portion the funding to ensure that happens.
There’s also the negotiation factor on long running shows, main characters end up in good negotiation positions for more money if a show is successful and their character isn’t easy to kill off. This is also why Netflix tries to cancel stuff before the 3rd season—that’s about the point who holds the power in negotiations shifts away from the studio.
An in-demand actor is a finite resource, they can only really work on one or two projects at any given time, so this also pushes their fees up as projects may end up in bidding wars. Conversely most entertainment costs very little to sell beyond the initial production costs, so after that’s broken even it’s free profit they can use for these fees.
Tl;dr capitalism
- The entertainment industry is not known to it’s job security, the earnings need to cover downtime as well.
- Agents, artists have agents who get them their jobs, from what I understand they are often paid a percentage of the fee that the artist charge, so not all money goes to the artists pocket. The agent also knows the industry and how much an artist is worth to the productions, if a movie has a famous actor, it can be a huge draw and vastly increase earnings, since the actor is a draw, they should be compensated well.
- When an artist gets well known in the industry, they have many more opportunities, so productions need to pay more to get the artist they want, this means booking a schedule way ahead in the future, blocking that time off from other projects.
- It can be VERY physically demanding to change their appearance from role to role, one role might require the actor to play an overweight character and shortly after that production wraps they may need to play a character in near physical prime.
Note that I am not an actor or artist, I am an IT guy who has little inside knowledge, though this should be a reasonable explanation of what is going on
Popularity is currency, if someone presence in a production will bring more eyeballs or prestige then it has value.
The same reason a small YouTuber makes less then a huge YouTuber when doing a ad read
For every one making millions, there are millions making near nothing.
People at the top of every industry DO make that much. Think about the UHC guy, you don’t think he was pulling that much?
Inequality is baked in.
I wonder the same thing about pro sportsmen…
Spectator sports is entertainment.
People watch them.
Regime whores keep plebs docile and there is a lot of value in that alone…
Plus mass media makes possible to generate revenue so regime whores know they can demand higher wage.
Why do you think john cena and NBA love China?
