I mean they’re not all super rich but especially in the USA and especially with actors or TV personalities 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. Some sources say that 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 if they’re at the top of their industry, make a fraction of that?
Because mass media technology duplicates their work millions and millions of times over. If you think about how many end consumers get the product 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 love 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.
The people in the arts who make lots of money are the exception, not the rule.
Yeah, do your community and yourself a favour and support local artists
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.
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 profits 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.
Most are not.
This is IMO the most awful stuff in these economy,
You have a couple of actors/singers who earn insane amount of money.
Then you have a large chunk who by mixing teaching, local theatre/bars, and some extra, get from a living wage, to a well-paid job.
And finally you have a majority who struggle.
All of that mostly based on being at the right place at the right time, and having the right friends
Well known entertainers lose all their privacy. I find that terrifying - it’s not just normal fans and being recognised everywhere they go - they attract wierdos, sometimes unsettling ones, sometimes dangerous ones. It’s ok to have a compensation high enough to be able to afford all the necessary safety measures for both themselves and their famillies.
Can confirm from experience. I’m a freelance 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 your spirit.
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.
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.
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.
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 last 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, and so they portion the funding to ensure that happens.
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.
An in-demand actor is a finite resource, they can only really work on one or two projects at any given time, so this also pushes their fees up as projects may end up in bidding wars. Conversely most entertainment costs very little to sell beyond the initial production costs, so after that’s broken even it’s free profit they can use for these fees.
Tl;dr capitalism
I wonder the same thing about pro sportsmen…
Spectator sports is entertainment.
While I’m not here to justify the enormous amount of money they’re paid, much much more than “essential” workers that been shoved down our throats that actually make the country run.
You have to factor in numerous things. These people travel a lot and obviously that can rack up in a short period of time. Furthermore, their homes are obviously pricier to maintain especially if in multiple locations, far more costly than the average apartment rent. There’s also a number of things that they have to contribute and usually they don’t have a safety net because their money is finite.
But of course that depends on the actor/actress and if there’s a big demand for them, that’s a huge thing in the entertainment industry. These are jobs that do not promise you that you’ll be earning money as compared to a retail job on a consistent and set schedule basis. You need to be marketable. You need to have the right qualities. You need to actually be variable i.e do many roles and do them well. The line is very narrow when it comes to entertainment.
Now things like why bad actors/actresses get top billing anyways or why some actors/actresses are paid far more than everyone else, it comes down to favorability and ass-kissing I guess.
