Why are entertainers paid so much?

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Aggravationstation@feddit.uk⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

I mean they’re not all super rich but especially in the USA 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. 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 when they’re at the top of their industry, make a fraction of that?

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Lasherz12@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Zaslav

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Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Most are not.

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- tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Can confirm from experience. I’m a 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 you spiritually.
  
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scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Because mass media technology duplicates their work millions and millions of times over. If you think about how many end consumers get the edict 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 live 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.

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dangling_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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Chessmasterrex@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The people in the arts who make lots of money are the exception, not the rule.

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- Geobloke@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yeah, do your community and yourself a favour and support local artists
  
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Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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 profit 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.

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breakingcups@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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9point6@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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 make it 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.

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.

Tl;dr capitalism

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stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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
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soyboy77@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I wonder the same thing about pro sportsmen…

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- cRazi_man@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Spectator sports is entertainment.
  
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RBWells@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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xc2215x@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
People watch them.

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