"If you do want to get into creative work, you’re going to have to see it as a side hustle. Not your main gig. That’s just the way it is.  It could become your main gig — if you’re very, very lucky — but the chances are slim. It’s hard to make it work."

"When you do get to create something, and you put it out for the world to see, if it’s free you’ll get a bunch of people who hate it, and if it’s not you’ll be called money hungry."

"The thing is, it's hard to do great creative work at the end of the day when you're tired and worn down by trying to make a living in a day job, in a business that you've founded to bring in income etc."

"I write because I'm passionate about it, and I love it. It's not going away. I could have a readership of zero and I'd still be here. ... It's something I do for the sake of doing it, because I want to do it. And that's what creative work is becoming."

"Let me tell you, people spend a lot less on writing than they do on music. How does a writer live, on the money we're talking right now?"

"How many people could tell you how much money they’ve given to their favourite artists or writers or creators? Not to platforms, not to businesses, to actual creatives?"

"If you tell people you're an artist, they'll tell you that’s not much of a career path and you should get a real job.  If you tell people you're building a tech startup platform for artists, they'll be impressed and want to hear more."

"Nicki Minaj, for example, has 77,000,000 Instagram followers consuming her free social content. 77,000,000 followers, and her last album sold 800,000 copies.  That means that barely 1% of her followers actually purchased an album. The rest? Streaming it, YouTubing it, just following without buying.  If a mega star like Nicki Minaj has a conversion rate that low for actual sales, what does that mean for indie creators?"

"People don't want to pay for content. They want to consume it for free, or monetise it for themselves. There's never been a greater sense of people feeling entitled to your creative work than there is right now.  And in that entitlement, respect for creative work is vanishing."

"That's the case for most content creators. Film makers. Artists. Writers. Musicians. We've made it easier than ever to make stuff, and harder than ever to make enough money to live."

"We're basically abolishing the full time musician/writer/filmmaker. We're abolishing the full time creative. That's what's happening.  We're giving money to tech platforms to become 'Unicorns' off the backs of creatives, and driving creatives out of business."