Today, Everyone is a Producer.

So who is the consumer?

I don’t know if this a quote from someone famous or just something I picked up somewhere - either way it has stuck with me for a long time. It goes “There are only two types of people: producers and consumers.”

Sure we all “consume” products, specifically clothing and food on a regular basis, and we are all producing something; through our time and labor. However each of us are participating in numerous markets at any given time. I would suggest that in the physical marketplace there are still more consumers than producers. But there is another marketplace that is becoming the largest, if it isn’t already, and that is the digital content marketplace.

What falls under this umbrella? Blogs, podcasts, MP3s, ePub books, Kindle, Amazon, YouTube/Vimeo videos, Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, SoundCloud, Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, and yes… Medium! The list could go on and on. I know I’m forgetting some. The point is that in this Information Age we live in the most produced thing is Content, and the question I want to ask is are there too few people consuming this content to justify the mass production of it?

Just look around the internet for a moment. Look at me! I’m writing this. Many others are writing blogs or making YouTube videos. Singers and bands are putting their music on SoundCloud. Self published authors are uploading to Amazon’s Kindle store. We post status updates and Tweets. We are flooding the market with content and information. If everyone is producing who is consuming?

I don’t buy music or movies anymore. There is no reason to. I rarely buy books either, unless it’s something I know I will read more than once. There are so many options for streaming content that there is no need to own or buy it. With Pandora and Spotify I don’t need to “own” music. Most bands let you stream their album on their website or a social site. With NetFlix, Hulu, and even YouTube I don’t need to “own” movies. I don’t “consume” in a monetary way anymore. Between the public library and Project Gutenberg I can read almost any book out there, with the exception of newer books or those self-published indie authors. So in that sense I am definitely not consuming books. Yet I am writing a novel, I am a producer, and I hope that people will consume it, yet I don’t consume many indie books.

Don’t get me wrong, people (other than the NSA) are viewing your videos, listening to your songs and reading your blogs and books. But half (if not more) are people producing content themselves. Some only comment or retweet to get your followers to follow them. Some blogs try to co-opt trending topics to raise their hits. And we all use hashtags to sound cool, relevant and maybe get some followers.

Compare this to a different time and you see what I mean about a flooded marketplace. In the 1950’s there may have been a bunch of aspiring writers, artists, musicians and armchair political theorists, but they were confined to their couches, garages and typewriters. The writer had to actively work to get their content out there. Today a writer can login to any site and post their thoughts, and if they want it can be done entirely anonymous. Try being anonymous in the 50’s about your hatred of Eisenhower. If you wanted to “blog”, you sent a letter to the editor of the local newspaper or got a gig as a columnist.

Staying with the example, in the 50's those few who actually “made it”, really did make it. They got the attention of everyone and people consumed their content. Consider Elvis he struggled throughout the early 50’s trying to get signed, he was even told that he shouldn’t quit his day job. But he had the talent and when he finally broke through he was an instant star! One of the reasons it was so hard to break through was that it was a sellers market, they could be picky about what content they released.

You could argue that today with all the content being released that it has become a buyers market. Content has become either cheap or entirely free. But what is the real cost? Remember that cheap and free content often isn’t always as high quality as expensive content. Shoes from Wal-Mart may function as shoes, but they are not as good as the shoes produced by Nike or Adidas. I think that one of the main reasons why content is free is that there is just so much of it. Because everyone is producing content, a lot of truly great content gets lost in the mix of just plain garbage. To word this differently: the dirt outweighs the diamonds.

Some of you may argue that in the 50’s to get content out there you had to go through gatekeepers and a lot of great content was lost because the creator didn’t know the right people or didn’t market themselves very well. You may say that today there are no gatekeepers. If you want to make music you can and you can sell it directly to your fans online without a record deal. Authors can blog and sell their books right from their websites. All of this is entirely accurate.

I recently stumbled upon a Forbes article titled Publishing Is Broken, We’re Drowning In Indie Books — And That’s A Good Thing. The author states that books need a more standardized rating system similar to how Rotten Tomato rates movies so that consumers can have a little help finding good books to read.

All this content that we are publishing, all the books, music, and movies made by independent creators, is only getting better. But there are still a ton of armatures out there shoveling their content without any quality to accompany it.

Maybe it’s because we are all too busy producing that we don’t consume? Or maybe it’s because we are all narcissists and that we think our crap is better than someone else’s crap? I don’t know the answer. But the reality is that there is more content being produced now than any other time, and I think a lot of it is just being ignored.

Don’t get me wrong. More options and more choices are always good things. Yet maybe we all need to take a deep breath and pause before we hit send, publish or post. Evaluate our strengths and weaknesses. Consider if the content we create is going to improve the lives of others? Will it entertain? Will it make people think? Will it challenge preconceived notions? Or is it just trying to take advantage of a popular hashtag or meme? Are we making the world of online-content a better place? Maybe some of those singer/songwriters on YouTube should set their channel to private until they get a little better. Maybe the artist shouldn’t get so offended when their stuff on DeviantArt is criticized.

I suggest that we stop trying to be the most popular producers out there and maybe consume a little bit more. Read, watch, view and enjoy the content out there for the sake of enjoyment, to be inspired, to understand our culture. We should be consumers to be better producers. We should craft our productions so they are worth the digital space they take up.