The creator economy has changed what it takes to succeed. Not only do creatives now have to develop their skill set – now they’re expected to have an audience and selling capacity to make it visible. Creativity is no longer enough, writes Gemma Desmond.
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There is a particular kind of irony in graduating with a creative degree only to realise that the easiest part of building a creative career is being creative.
I know this because I have spent the past year trying to do exactly that. I’ve taken internships, pitched articles and kept trying to find my way into an ever-changing industry. The advice given to young creatives often centres on everything surrounding the work, from building an audience and creating opportunities to making yourself visible. None of it is inherently bad advice. But the fact that it has become necessary says something about how much is now expected beyond the work itself.
In Australia, building a creative career can already feel like fighting for one of the few seats at the table. Search for an entry-level job in fashion, publishing, media, design or the arts and the options can feel limited before you even filter by location. For those of us building careers outside the major cities, Sydney and Melbourne, the opportunities narrow even further.
So we adapt.
It is no longer enough to make the work. You are expected to build an audience around it and, increasingly, around yourself. Visibility has become its own form of currency in creative industries, blurring the distinction between creative and creator. And those two words might sound almost identical, but they carry very different expectations.
A creative is defined by the work they produce. A creator is expected to make the work visible.
The creator economy has given opportunities that previous generations never had. What started as individuals building audiences online has grown into a powerful industry, influencing everything from consumer behaviour to the way brands market themselves. There is, of course, something genuinely valuable about that. Creative careers are no longer entirely dependent on being chosen by the right editor, buyer or person in the room. The internet offered a way around traditional gatekeepers and, for a while, that felt like the point.
But the same digital economy that created this freedom has also complicated the value of the work too. Tools capable of producing copy, imagery and ideas in seconds can approximate skills that once took years to develop, often convincingly enough to compete for the same attention. The issue is not that AI can replace creativity, but that it can make creative labour look deceptively easy.
And platforms that begin as an alternative can quickly start to feel like an expectation.
Take writing. The appeal of Substack is easy to understand. It offers a kind of freedom traditional publishing often cannot, giving writers somewhere to develop ideas without waiting for a pitch to be accepted or an article to fit neatly within someone else’s editorial calendar. Writers can build a body of work on their own terms, without requiring permission.
There is something strange about being encouraged to build your own publication while simultaneously trying to convince an existing one to employ you. An audience is treated as proof of employability, and in building a platform for my work, I had technically become a creator in order to keep being a writer.
Fashion is operating under the same logic. Emerging designers are no longer competing on the strength of a collection alone, but for the attention surrounding it. Garments produced might be the product, but personality is often what sells it. The designer is increasingly expected to become the content too, turning the process, the studio and themselves into something people can follow.
Even applying for creative jobs can begin to feel like creating content about your ability to create content.
The problem is not that the creator economy exists, but that it has changed what it takes to succeed. Freelance work increasingly forms part of the career itself, rather than adding to it. This kind of economic fragmentation means work is often pieced together across multiple roles rather than built around a single one. What emerges is a generation of creatives spending almost as much time sustaining a career as developing their skills. The irony is difficult to ignore when maintaining employability can leave less time for the very thing you are trying to be employed to do. Sometimes it feels as though doing the work privately doesn’t count anymore.
There is enormous freedom in being able to create your own opportunities, particularly in a country where traditional pathways into the industry can feel limited. But we should probably question an industry that celebrates this entrepreneurial freedom without asking why so many young creatives feel they have no choice but to become entrepreneurs in the first place.
Maybe, that is how the creator economy killed the creative – not by replacing creativity, but by making creativity alone no longer enough.
About the author
Gemma Desmond is an emerging Adelaide-based writer with a background in fashion. Creativity has always sat at the centre of her work, earning her the title of Creative Innovator of the Year and continuing to inform her perspective as a writer. Her work spans fashion, media and the creative industries, often exploring the ideas, behaviours and conversations that shape the culture around us. You kind find Gemma’s work on Substack and Instagram.
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