We now spend half our waking hours consuming entertainment

Think how much time you spend looking at a phone, tablet, computer, or TV. We stream music and video, lose ourselves in YouTube and TikTok, scroll through social media feeds, and so on. How many of your waking hours are devoted to staring at those devices? According to data from Luminate, the number is around 50%.

Yep. If you’re awake for 16 hours a day, there’s a good chance you spend eight of those hours consuming some kind of entertainment.

That’s a lot. But music critic Ted Gioia asks an obvious question: If we’re ingesting so much entertainment, why aren’t artists and creators making more? Actually, artists are collecting getting poorer. How? Why?