I am one of the many citizens of the USA who claims to be Irish, usually after a whiskey and a story from my touring days that gets less reliable with every telling.
And Irish or not, I would like to say that Ireland is really on to something.
Its Basic Income for the Arts pilot gave 2,000 artists €325 a week and the results were strong enough that the Irish government moved toward making it permanent. Because for every €1 invested, the good people of Ireland got €1.39 back. Participants spent eleven more hours per week on their creative practice than the control group and were less likely to leave the arts.
And let’s be clear: €325 a week (about $377 USD) is not a lot of money. It is not some glamorous life in a villa in Tuscany with a personal chef named Luca who brings you espresso while you ponder the fate of indie film.
It is rent help. Grocery money. Breathing room. That’s all.
And yet look what happened. Artists made more work. Society got more value.
That, to me, is the real point. Not only that artists struggle less when they have support, though of course that matters. It’s that all of us gain more when artists have a net. We get more music, more films, more poems, more plays, more paintings, more stories that help people make sense of being alive. We get work that deepens community, sharpens empathy and reminds us that human beings are more than consumers dragging ourselves from one expense to the next.
Ireland understood something most governments and industries forget: artists are infrastructure.
Especially in the United States, we define “useful” as people who make bridges, balance budgets, fix boilers and renovate, yet again, the Kennedy Center. And truly, I enjoy a functioning boiler as much as the next person.
But artists build things too. They build inner life. They build memory. They build meaning.
They build the stories a culture tells about itself when it is falling apart and trying to remember what matters.
Human beings do not claw their way through history sustained by quarterly earnings reports and Dow averages. We want a dark theater and a story that wrecks us in exactly the right way. We want songs and murals, protest posters and comedians that explain us to ourselves.
That was true in ancient civilizations. It was true in the United States during the New Deal, when federal arts programs funded writers, actors, directors and painters during the Depression. Culture was understood to be a meaningful part of public life.
Which raises an awkward question.
Five days of war spending at $1 billion a day is enough to fund about 255,000 artists for a full year at Ireland’s rate. (And that $1 billion per day figure is super conservative; estimates put the price tag for the first six days of the Iran war at over $11 billion.)
A culture that can spend that kind of money on destruction can surely afford to spend something on creation.
So no, this is not about whether the money exists. It does.
The real question is what we value, and whether we have enough imagination and courage to invest in the people who make life more human.
Now, while I would love the rest of the world to copy Ireland immediately, there is also a practical lesson here for indie creatives.
If nobody is handing you a net, build one, starting with your own finances.
“Side hustle” can sound like a LinkedIn bot who refers to coffee as a performance enhancer and wants you to wake up at 4:12 a.m. to optimize your mindset. But for indie creatives, a side hustle can be the difference between creative freedom and forced compromises.
Your side hustle does not have to be in the entertainment industry. In fact, it should not be. When strikes happen, pandemics erupt and AI disrupts, then buyers freeze, streamers merge, audiences pull back and investors vanish. Creatives with income coming from somewhere else have options. They can keep writing. Keep developing. Keep meeting. Keep making choices based on vision instead of fear.
And creative projects need nets too.
I’ve been thinking about this as we work on distribution for Original Sound. Our vinyl and DVD sales strategy is part of building a wider revenue net around the project. Physical media is finding its audience again, especially among Gen Z consumers who are tired of paying for five streaming services and still not being able to find the movie they want. They want to own what they love. They want access that does not disappear because a platform changed its mind on a random Tuesday. Our strategy is designed to meet them where they are at.
The net for your project might include a podcast, merchandise, collector editions, educational licensing, live events or marketing partnerships that expand the reach of the work.
Some of the best producing I know comes from refusing the false choice between art and strategy. The challenge of finding multiple paths for a project is its own creative act. It forces you to understand your audience more deeply. It forces you to think about how a story can reverberate in multiple formats. It forces you to build something that can sustain itself.
Build your net.
Build it for your life with an income stream that does not collapse every time the industry convulses. Build it for your projects with multiple ways for the work to reach people and generate value. Build it because when artists have a net, they make better work, take better risks, and give the rest of us more of what makes life feel livable in the first place.
Ireland ran the experiment. The results are in. Let’s all be Irish.
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