The Timeless Debate for Creatives
I think the first time I ever really pondered deeply over the word 'value' (without necessarily using that word), was on a long-haul flight.
I'd just finished a hasty vacation in India visiting my parents, squeezed in between a college degree, touring and studio schedules, and the particular kind of administrative exhaustion that comes with trying to look legible enough as a full-time professional artist for a government official at the Ausländerbehörde — the German equivalent of immigration office.
The kind of appointment where you show up with a folder full of documents, trying to prove that what you do constitutes an actual career.
My co-passenger was a lovely young South Asian woman repatriating with her IT-engineer (surprise!) husband back to Europe.
At some point during the flight, she handed me an exquisite little box.
'What is it?' I asked.
'Open it.'
It was one of the most beautiful sets of miniature handmade candles I had ever seen.
What followed were a few minutes I have never quite forgotten. Not because of the candles themselves, but because of what I noticed happening inside me in real time.
Two distinct responses, arriving almost simultaneously.
The first, when she told me it was a gift:
Delight — followed almost immediately by a flicker of something more complicated.
‘Wait, do I even want this? I can't really refuse now, can I. So I have to keep it?’
The second, when she mentioned what she usually sells them for:
An embarrassing shock at how much less than what something like that would be priced at in the EU, coupled with a confusion I couldn't quite put my finger on about what that disparity even meant.
For her. The exqusite work. For the wonderful, human exchange we had just made without either of us choosing it quite consciously.
There is so much that could be said about that moment that could be judged, concluded, criticised, praised, or even extracted.
But the part I keep coming back to, one that I could never honestly erase, was a much simpler fact that has haunted me since.
I have no memory of where those candles went hours after disembarking, let alone where they are today.
Maybe it was the semester I was struggling through.
A strange cocktail of music production, business modules, and psychology — or the intensity of the years that followed, building a career, fighting to prove my ‘worth’, staying afloat as a young ‘struggling artist’ (often with a sense of pride).
But I never forgot that first moment in my life when I was so acutely aware of how quickly my perception of a moment moved from sheer appreciation to what I can only describe, with some discomfort, as utter indifference.
And somewhere at the back of my mind, a question kept doing the rounds that I didn't have an answer for at the time:
‘is there anything about this encounter that mirrors some of the patterns in my own artistic practice that I am struggling to come to terms with?’
I didn't have an answer then. I'm not sure I have a clean one now.
But that question is the epicentre of what this piece is about.
So why am I even writing this?
I'm no expert in economics.
That disclaimer feels important to make, partly out of honesty and partly because this conversation has been monopolised for too long by people who speak in a register that shuts most of us out before we've even sat down.
I have a partial degree in music business, along with a couple of years of business studies in my last two years of school in India which I eventually abandoned for the arts. And along the way the opportunity to work with a few mentors who didn’t shy away from one of the most avoidant topics you can broach with a ‘creative’ human today.
Money.
My somewhat hybrid background ended up being useful the way it did because it sits right at the intersection of art and commerce, humbling me repetitively at that intersection turning out to be one of the most ruthlessly complicated places to stand today.
But I have been digging into this for a long time. And have run experiments in it without even realising that's what I was doing. Experiments that would qualify, in retrospect, as lived proof of two very different philosophies about how economics ought to work.
What I've come to conclude is that the choice between them is ultimately an individual one. But that doesn't cancel the implications involved, and definitely doesn't mean the system all of us are working with, is neutral.
So. The title. Because if you've landed here without having encountered these terms before, that's actually the ideal starting point.
How do you even come across a term like 'gift economy'?
Most people don't.
Not directly.
You're more likely to feel its edges without knowing its name. In the frustration of being asked to work for ‘exposure’, in the guilt of charging a friend for a service you put in work to gather expertise in, the strange cultural pressure that says artists should be grateful to live the life they do.
The gift economy as a formal concept with a name generally tends to live in academic anthropology, in certain corners of alternative economics, and increasingly in the kind of content that circulates in creative and wellness communities online.
Usually stripped of its complexity and oversimplified as generosity.
The term itself comes from the work of French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, whose 1925 essay ‘The Gift’ examined exchange systems in Polynesian, Melanesian, and Pacific Northwest societies and found something that upended prevailing economic thinking:
These communities did not barter in the way economists assumed pre-monetary societies did.
They gifted.
But not freely.
And, the gift created obligation.
An invisible, unspoken, deeply social obligation to receive, and to reciprocate.
The gift was not a transaction in the modern sense. But it was also never just generosity.
Mauss called the gift a 'total social fact' — meaning it was simultaneously economic, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual. It bound people together. It established identity, hierarchy, and trust. It was, in many ways, the original social contract.
Why is this conversation relevant right now?
Because we are living through a period of profound disillusionment with the way power and wealth are distributed, and the gift economy keeps surfacing as a kind of antidote.
An alternative. A return to something more human.
And that instinct is not wrong.
Look around. The concentration of wealth at the top has reached levels that would have seemed cartoonish twenty years ago. Institutions that were supposed to represent public interest have been hollowed out or captured by private ones. Trust in money itself — in the systems built around it, in the promise that working hard within those systems leads somewhere, is at a historic low for large portions of the global population.
So it makes sense that people start asking the most relevant question in the room:
Is there another way?
A model where generosity is the engine rather than greed?
The gift economy enters the collective consciousness precisely at these moments. It happened in the counterculture movements of the 1960s. It happened again in the early internet, with its radical ethos of open access and shared knowledge.
Wikipedia is probably the most cited example of gift economics working at scale — a vast, collaboratively maintained repository of human knowledge, given freely, sustained by voluntary contribution.
Open source software is another. Mutual aid networks during the pandemic were another.
There is real evidence that gift economies can produce extraordinary things. That generosity, when it operates within the right cultural and social conditions, can be more generative than competition.
But here is where it gets complicated. And where I think the current discourse tends to flatten something that deserves a lot more texture.
The romance of the ‘alternative’ and the problem with extremes
Every time a dominant system fails (and transactional capitalism is failing a lot of people in a lot of visible ways right now), the human impulse is to reach for its opposite.
If exploitation is the disease, surely generosity is the cure?
If money has corrupted everything it touches, surely a world without monetary transaction is the answer?
This is understandable.
But it is also, historically, how we end up trading one set of problems for another.
Because the gift economy, as an ideal, has also carried its own shadow.
Mauss himself was careful to point out that gift exchange is never truly free of power dynamics. In many of the societies he studied, the obligation to give, and to give more than you received if needed, was itself a mechanism of social control.
The potlatch ceremonies of Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples, for example, involved chiefs giving away or even destroying enormous amounts of wealth to demonstrate their power and generate social debt in others. Generosity, in that context, was also domination.
The point here is not to label the gift economy as ‘bad’.
It is to remember that no economic system exists outside of the human beings operating it, with all their contradictions, their needs, and their capacity for both extraordinary generosity and extraordinary rationalisation of self-interest.
The gift economy idealised, (particularly in the way it circulates in creative and spiritual communities online), often skips this part.
It presents giving as inherently pure and transaction as inherently corrupt, leaving very little room for the question of who, exactly, is being asked to give.
So what is a transaction, really?
There’s an interesting question.
Strictly speaking, a transaction is any exchange where something of value moves between parties.
That is it. That is the whole definition.
And once you sit with that, a thought experiment opens up that is worth staying in for a while.
Is any relationship in your life truly free of transaction?
Your friendship — you offer time, loyalty, presence.
Your love — you offer vulnerability, care, emotional labour.
Your family — generations of unspoken debt and reciprocity that nobody drew up a contract for but everyone feels.
Even silence between two people carries currency.
The question is not so much about whether a transaction is happening, and more about what currency is being used, and how conscious are we of all or any of the above.
This is where the fallacy of money as the only currency does its trickery.
Because money is only one currency.
Humans also transact in attention, energy, time, reputation, emotional labour, creative output, loyalty, and silence.
The dangerous myth — and one that has been used with remarkable consistency to extract value from people who create — is that if no money changes hands, nothing of value is being exchanged.
That myth has a long, well-documented history. And it has cost a lot of creatives a great deal.
A brief word on what money actually is
Before money became the thing it is today, (a unit of financial power, a score, a measure of worth), it was a symbol of trust.
Early currency systems, from Mesopotamian clay tablets to cowrie shells to the gold standard, were fundamentally promises.
‘I have this. I will honour that.’
Currency was agreement before it was anything else.
David Graeber's ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’, slowly upends the comfortable myth that barter preceded money and that monetary exchange evolved naturally from simple trade.
Graeber argues, drawing on decades of anthropological evidence, that credit and social obligation came first. Money formalised what community already practised: the acknowledgement that we owe each other.
That ‘debt’, in its original sense, was not a financial instrument but a social one.
The abuse of that symbol — its transformation from a unit of trust into a tool of power — is where things began to break. And understanding that is important, because it reframes the question.
The problem is not money itself. The problem is what money has been made to do, and in whose interests it has been made to do it.
Which brings us to the creative industries. And to what is, in my humble opinion but honest experience, one of the most under-examined economic disasters of the last three decades.
The music industry: where the gift economy irrefutably failed
If you want to see what happens when the gift economy is romanticised without accountability, applied to an industry of highly skilled professionals, and gradually formalised into a structure that benefits everyone except the actual creators at its centre, look no further than the music industry.
The deterioration did not happen overnight.
It has been progressive, each stage normalising the next, until the current situation — where a multi-billion dollar platform can pay an artist a third of a cent per stream and describe itself as a champion of the creative economy, becomes not just possible but defensible.
It started with ‘pay to play’.
Musicians paying venues for the right to perform, absorbing ticket costs upfront, walking away with almost nothing even when they had sold out their allocation. What began as a regional phenomenon in 1980s Los Angeles spread globally and became, in many markets, standard practice.
The logic was always the same: you should be grateful for the opportunity. The stage itself is the gift.
Then came piracy. Napster launched in 1999 and within two years had 80 million registered users sharing music that had taken engineers, producers, session musicians, mixing engineers, and artists years to create.
For free. Without consent.
According to Pew Research, 79% of music downloaders gathered files without paying rights holders at all. The cultural normalisation was so complete that an entire generation grew up considering produced music that required an extraordinary combination of highly-qualified skills and training, as something that simply existed in the world, freely available, like air.
The idea that someone's labour was embedded in every track — highly skilled, expensive, time-consuming labour — was almost entirely abstracted away.
Streaming arrived as the salvation narrative. And to be fair, it stabilised an industry that was in genuine freefall. But salvation for whom is always the question worth asking.
Spotify and arithmetic
Spotify currently has over 750 million monthly active users.
In 2025, it paid out over $11 billion to the music industry — the largest single-platform payout in history.
On the surface, that number is extraordinary. Below it, a horror movie with no comic relief.
Spotify does not pay artists directly.
It pays rights holders — labels, publishers, distributors — who then divide what remains based on contract terms that most artists signed under duress, inexperience, or simple desperation to be heard.
The average payout to artists sits between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. If that’s too many numbers, a professional musician needs approximately 800,000 monthly plays to earn the equivalent of a full-time minimum wage at $15 per hour.
A UN report by WIPO concluded that current streaming economics are destroying music worldwide and called for a complete overhaul of the royalty system.
The per-stream rate has been declining — down 43% between 2018 and 2020 alone, even as the platform's valuation keeps growing.
The system, as one analyst put it, is not broken. It is optimised. Optimised for the people who control the rights and the infrastructure. Not for the people who made the music.
The salt on the wound came in June 2025.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek led a $702 million funding round for Helsing — an AI-powered military drone and combat software company, and became its chairman.
He had previously invested $115 million in the same company in 2021.
This is the same platform paying musicians a third of a cent per stream, whose per-stream rate has been falling for years, and which a UN agency has said is destroying music worldwide.
The artists whose work built the platform are being asked to accept micro-payments while the platform finances sophisticated weapons systems most of the artsists whose work the financing is based upon, abhor.
That is not a ‘gift economy’.
It’s a nightmare.
And then there's AI
Just when it seemed the industry had located the bottom, the floor opened again.
In 2024, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records sued AI music companies Suno and Udio for mass copyright infringement — training their generative models on decades of recorded music without licence, consent, or payment.
By 2025, over 70 infringement lawsuits had been filed against AI companies by copyright owners across the creative industries, more than double the number from the year before. Independent musicians filed class action suits seeking to represent thousands of artists whose recordings were used in training data without permission.
The grotesque irony at the centre of this: AI systems trained on original human creative work, work that required years of skill development, expensive equipment, engineering expertise, and the kind of intangible artistic intelligence that takes a lifetime to cultivate, are now generating music that competes directly in the same market as the artists whose labour built the model.
The creators are effectively having to sue for the right to their own original work, which was taken without permission, used to build a commercial product, and is now being sold back into the very industry the creators depend on for survival.
If there is a cleaner example of the gift economy being operationalised without the consent of the giver, I have not come across it.
The uncomfortable truth about who gets to give
Here is where I think the conversation needs to go somewhere it rarely does.
The gift economy is a beautiful idea.
It is also, in its current cultural form, a privilege. One that is rarely named.
The ability to give your work freely, to share music without charge, to build an audience before monetising, to perform for exposure, to release into the world and trust that something will come back eventually — these are options that are usually available to people with financial cushions.
People with family or government support structures that absorb the cost of years without income. People in countries where the basic infrastructure of life does not consume every available resource before there is anything left over for art.
My teacher, Peter Crone often speaks about the stories we inherit without choosing them — the invisible conditioning, the architecture of circumstance that shapes what we believe is possible for us before we are even conscious enough to question it.
The gift economy conversation, as it circulates in most creative spaces, does not account for that architecture. It speaks from a position of assumed stability. It presents generosity as a universal option rather than a class-contingent one.
A musician in Lagos, Manila, or Bogotá competes on the same streaming platform as someone in Stockholm or New York. They receive the same fraction of a cent per stream.
What they do not have is the same minimum wage, social safety net, or access to grants and arts funding, as options to draw on while they wait for the algorithm to notice them.
The gift is only free if your survival is already secured by someone else.
That is not a spiritual insight. Just a structural fact.
On value — and the skill nobody teaches
Understanding value is one of the most underrated skills in existence. And one of the most consistently exploited, across capitalist societies, communist ones, and everything in between.
From teaching for a city council in a socialist country to freelancing for independent institutes and agencies ranging from boutique to premium, the pattern holds everywhere: the perception of value, and the ability to assess its quality accurately, is underdeveloped on both sides of the exchange.
The buyer rarely understands what they are purchasing. The creator rarely has the language or the leverage to make it legible. And that gap isn’t a neutral one.
It comes with consequences. And almost always disadvantages the person who made the thing.
Whether closing that gap is the creator's responsibility is a whole separate conversation. But it doesn't reduce the risk. Because when value is misunderstood, misrepresented, or deliberately obscured, it is almost always the creator's work that ends up as collateral damage. Not by accident. By default. By a system that benefits from keeping that gap exactly where it is.
So do we just charge ruthlessly for everything?
Good question. And I want to be careful here, because this is where the conversation tends to overcorrect.
As artists and creatives, free samples are practically built into what we do.
The YouTube video, the demo, the set, the portfolio. The work we share to open a door, to start a conversation, to demonstrate what we are capable of.
That is not going away, nor should it entirely. There is genuine value in giving, in generosity as a practice, in contributing to a culture and a community without always counting the cost.
But reaching for a charge your worth framework inside a system that already runs entirely on the unacknowledged gifts of its creators, without anyone agreeing to that arrangement, without anyone being asked — is a different conversation entirely.
One that deserves considerably more honesty than most of the rhetoric currently offers.
Because a lot of what circulates as economic empowerment for artists arrives dressed in quasi-spiritual language. It takes a structural problem of power, labour rights, platform accountability, of a decades-long erosion of standards, and reframes it as a mindset issue.
It asks you to fix with your attitude what was broken by design.
And in doing so, it quietly removes the burden of accountability from the institutions, platforms, and systems that created the conditions in the first place.
The question was never whether to give.
It was whether anyone ever asked permission before they started taking.
References
Mauss, M. (1925). The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.
United Musicians and Allied Workers (2021). Summary of UN/WIPO Report on Streaming. weareumaw.org
National Endowment for the Arts. (2021). But What About the Artists? arts.gov
US Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024). Occupational Outlook Handbook: Musicians and Singers. bls.gov
Kim, J.Y., Kay, A., Campbell, T., Shepherd, S. Passion exploitation research, Duke University. Cited in KQED Arts.
Whalen, M. (2026). Spotify's $11 Billion Question: Why Artists Still Feel Underpaid. Medium.
Rolling Stone Culture Council. (2025). Spotify Under Fire Over Investments and Artist Pay. council.rollingstone.com
Copyright Alliance. (2026). AI Copyright Lawsuit Developments in 2025: A Year in Review. copyrightalliance.org
Chartlex. (2026). Music Industry AI Lawsuits Tracker 2026. chartlex.com
Vinyl Culture. (2025). Pay-to-Play Nation: How Live Venues Are Bleeding Artists Dry. vinylculture.substack.com
Crone, P. The Mind Architect. petercrone.com (various works on inherited conditioning and unconscious belief systems)
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