The Money:Freedom Matrix

Or, We Gotta Take Jobs Too

I think the Spotify layoffs are driving folks a little bit crazy. And it makes sense if you think the only way to find legitimacy in an art form is to get a salary from a big company in that field. You do a lot of annoying work that’s dropped on you for the pre-determined amount of money, and you know the folks steering the ship know what they’re doing. And it seems like they don’t right now.

The people who make shows and the listeners who love those shows are the ones with the power, both from holding the attention of the audience and the audience voting with their dollars, but also with the skills that come from proving you’re good at your job and can do it for others for pay.

Very, very few creators are just doing Their Big Show for the majority of their income. I produce three of my own shows, but also the sports show for Defector and the debate show that’s a part of the Multicrew, plus I take consulting calls and try to bring in more B2B production work for Multitude as a whole.

I don’t only play D&D as my job! Of course, I also take outside work.

Being an independent creator means making decisions on your time and freedom. We do need to make them, but what a bargain with the devil. We ran into this a bunch when we were first running Multitude; we had our shows that we were running which made some money that we loved, and the shows we were making for others brought in the revenue we needed but were grinding us into a paste. We got better at sniffing out the jobs that were ruses, like the time we backed away from making a six-episode limited series for Big Fraud OZY.

So, I made this matrix.

It seems simple at first, but by running any potential workload through the matrix, we can decide if it’s worth it. Like so:

Things from all three of our departments, Creative, Ad Sales, and Studio Production, are on the matrix. No one is exempt. We balance jobs on the top-right with the bottom-left and hope for the top-left.

Think about the last job you had in a traditional office or in the service industry, and how much annoying stuff you had to do just becuase your manager said. Well, that’s in the bottom right.

The only way we survive as independent creators is if we take ourselves seriously as small businesses. The first step is, how do I spend my time in a way that’s worth it?

If working in a traditional office is realizing the emperor doesn’t have any clothes, maybe this could be asking “Well, what clothes SHOULD I be wearing?