I think often about the sustainability of Black women’s creative work. I also think about the what it would take in order for Black women to be properly cited and compensated for their work. To this end, I only just recently watched Beyoncé’s Homecoming because I knew that I wanted to write about Black women, compensation and audience desire for this space. The film has been on my radar and I have talked to people about Homecoming, but I had not sat down and attentively watched it until last week.
Two weeks ago I learned that Rihanna Fenty is worth six hundred million dollars and that she is now the worlds richest woman musician. It gave me pause for several reasons. First, I know that it is incredibly difficult for a Black person let alone a Black woman to amass that kind of capital. Second Rihanna Fenty no longer makes music and has spent her time working on her make-up brand, her lingerie brand and lastly her new couture brand.
It made me wonder whether creating content is no longer in Rihanna’s best interest in light of the audiences lack of desire to pay for content and the economics of the streaming wars.
As I thought about both of their trajectories I began to wonder about Rihanna’s wealth and the fact that she has moved from creating content to creating tangible products that she essentially licenses with her brand. I also began to think about Béyonce Knowles Carter’s reportedly sixty million dollar Nextflix deal, the production values of Homecoming and the sustainability of that level of work.
One of the things that Beyoncé is explicit about in Homecoming is her granular attention to detail for the show. She chose the costumes, the sets, the lighting everything. Large shows with intentional production values are expensive. Homecoming is a beautiful homage to the legacy of Black marching bands, HBCU’s and the various kinds of beauty, from toes to crown, that we see within Black women.
In the middle of the film Beyoncé stopped me dead in my tracks when she began to lay out the numbers.
She rehearsed with the her entire team for 4 months. She rehearsed with the band four months prior to the entire team. This is eight months of paid rehearsal payroll.
She mentions that at any given point on stage there are two hundred people. This is a payroll of two hundred people on stage.
She also had three sound stages built. One of the band, one for the dancers, and one of the creative team. The soundstages cost as well.
With an arguable three project sixty million dollar deal, the labor and production costs for creating Homecoming constitute an incredibly high over head for making digital content.
As I began to think about how expensive her production values are AND how expensive her team was I began to wonder about the sustainability and costs of putting together these kinds of shows. One on hand it is beautiful and wonderful addition to the visual landscape as it pertains to Black culture.
On the other hand it is created in a media environment that is often passively and/or actively hostile to Black women artists.
Why do I believe this?
For four years I have been tracking how Black women web series directors and creators raise money in order to sustain themselves as they figure out how to leverage their web series credentials into television writing gigs and careers as filmmakers. What I noticed is that there is no guarantee that creating the work and having a social media following will translate into community provided dollars for Black women artists. I saw this with Regan Gomez’s web series and fund raiser in 2013. On one hand I think that people are excited to consume the content created by Black women artists, on another hand, I think that social media platforms teach people in general that they do not have to pay for content with high production values or otherwise. There is community support, and the community/audience support is what I am interested in. Jeanine Daniel and Numa Pierre both formerly of Black and Sexy TV have had success with fundraising within their communities in order to sustain their work on Black and Sexy TV in the past.
However, I do believe that the contemporary media environment does not lend itself to the sustainability of creating content.
The internet by is very nature is a duplication machine, so if something can be copied it will be copied and shared here. The expensiveness of Beyoncé’s labor and production costs underscores this.
I do not want it to be this way. However brother Baldwin tells us nothing can be changed until it is faced. My outlook is not dire in that I don’t think that Black women’s digital content will not be created. My question is always at what cost? Consequently, I do think that there is a gap between what an audience says it wants, what it is willing to pay for and how expensive it is to put out the work in the first place. Seeing the consequences of Rihanna Fenty’s choice to move away from content was a crystallizing moment as well.
Do you think that my read is too dire?
Do you know of any Black women digital content producers who are able to sustain themselves? Tag them below.
Is there are part of this essay that would like me to clarify or explore more of? Let me know.
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