I don't think the economy in this segment is changing drastically. Top handful of rockstars, actors, athletes, soccer players, etc were always compensated very well, while the median ones weren't. Not like you can get a Master in Talk Show Hosting degree and get a more or less predictable career path similar to the engineering/medicine degrees.
Come to think of it, the rise of multiple competing content platforms would actually lower the top performers' revenues due to the audience splintering.
Given that A16Z likely holds some stake in the mentioned businesses, I would treat this as simply another piece of marketing material for some upcoming IPOs.
It's kind of subjective. Decades ago, CEO's made 20:1 compared to workers. That's "compensated very well". Today is 200:1. It's still very well. A whole order of magnitude better.
In developed countries, today's winners win bigger. The losers stagnate. Globally, many have been lifted out of poverty.
The poor in developing countries are doing better. The wealthy are doing better. The middle class is not.
Decades ago CEOs consumed well over twenty times as much as the average worker even though their official wages were only twenty times as high because of a huge range of tax exemptions and write offs that were eliminated in the 80s.
I agree that there is definitely a pareto distribution in earnings—and there probably always has been for creative work. I don't know if this means that there are less people making a living in each respective field. For that, I'd like to see some hard data. How fat is the tail of the power curve, anyway? And how many curves are out there?
Come to think of it, the rise of multiple competing content platforms would actually lower the top performers' revenues due to the audience splintering.
Given that A16Z likely holds some stake in the mentioned businesses, I would treat this as simply another piece of marketing material for some upcoming IPOs.