Would you pay $5 a month to stream original content from independent performing artists and performing arts organizations? All it would cost you — $5. For that $5 a month you would be introduced to performers, artists, and arts organizations all over the country. You could watch their videos, hear their original recordings, and share your own work.

I’m talking about turning Raft into a platform for discovering the performing arts. So in addition to reading about the arts and art history, you could watch and listen to the people who are making work right now.

Raft’s mission is threefold: to re-imagine critical writing about the arts; to make American art history more accessible and discoverable; and to help artists build sustainable careers. Let’s zero in on that last piece.

Today it’s harder than ever to make it as a creative. Sure, there are plenty of tools for making and getting your work out there, as they say. But the curation is lacking. The big streaming platforms are popularity contests. The nonprofit arts are not popular.

Over the past two years I have been working on a tool for selling and gating content online. It’s called Monetized. Building Monetized taught me a lot about the payments ecosystem. There are dozens of new companies and emerging technologies in this space, all aiming to solve the problem of getting creators paid for their online content. Substack, the platform we use to produce this magazine, is one of these companies. It allows writers and publishers to get paid directly from their subscribers. (We haven’t turned on paid subscriptions for Raft yet. It’s estimated that only 1-2% of free subscribers for any Substack will go paid. But we might try that in the future.)

Another emerging technology is called Web Monetization, an open protocol and proposed standard for the web that allows for streaming payments.

Starting this month, Raft is featuring a course on Web Monetization. You can find it in the navigation bar up top. This course was funded by Grant for the Web.

The beauty of Web Monetization lies in its simplicity. You pay $5 a month to a payment processor called Coil, and Coil sends your money in the form of micropayments to creators according to how much time you spend enjoying their content. You pay Coil; Coil pays creators.

In theory it’s a simple solution to the problem of monetization. In practice, it’s proving more difficult to implement. For starters, content creators must have a large number of Web Monetization members coming to their site.

So I put the question to you: Would you pay $5 a month for access to a site for streaming and purchasing performing arts content? Building such a site is within our capabilities. What I want to know: Will people use it?

Raft Community Zoom meeting: Tuesday. February 7 at 6 PM Eastern.

Tell me what role Raft plays in your life. What more would you like it to be? Would you like it to be a streaming platform? I can also answer any questions about Web Monetization and help you get started with it.

Register for the Zoom session here. Registration is required.

Are you a performing artist or the administrator of an arts organization? I’d love your feedback on a survey of artists’ digital content practices. The survey takes about ten minutes to complete and is anonymous. See below for more details. Thank you!

Earlier this year I announced that Raft will be publishing a series of article on Web Monetization. These articles are part of a project called Web Monetization for the Arts, and it’s funded by Grant for the Web.

The project has two components. First, it seeks to learn from performing artists and arts organizations about their online content strategies. Second, it creates a series of informational articles and question/answer sessions about Web Monetization, a proposed standard for the web that allows for streaming payments. Put your video on a web monetized platform and anyone who watches it will pay you for the time they spend watching it.

The first part of the project — the survey — is what I’m writing you about today.

If you’re a performing artist or an administrator of performing arts organization, we want to hear from you. You can find the survey here. It takes about 10 minutes to complete and is anonymous. It asks questions like: Do you promote your work on social media? What, if anything, do you optimize that content for and how do you track it? Do you host your own website? You get the idea.

We want to hear from a wide range of artists and groups, from jazz musicians to ballet dancers, community theaters to opera halls. It’s my hope that this project is the first step in developing a web monetized platform for independent performing artists, a place for people to discover new work and for creators to be compensated.

Thank you for your help.

Thank you for subscribing to Critical Read’s newsletter. I hope this note finds you well and your 2022 off to a great start.

I want to let you know about a few changes here.

First, Critical Read has moved to Substack. Our stories will now be sent directly to subscribers upon publication, via email. This saves us the work of publishing and then promoting our stories in a separate newsletter.

Second, our essays will now be published under the name Raft. Our mission is still the same: to make American art and art history inclusive and discoverable. The name is new. It was time for a change.

We’re launching Raft with three free series:

Life Raft. 300-word art appreciations. These essays began as Art Is Essential and were focused on the art that writers were missing during the pandemic lockdowns. We’re continuing this very popular series under a new name.

The Paddle. Longer ekphrastic essays. Our somewhat humorously named series on living the creative life. This series will also feature audio.

Open Canon. Profiles of American artists you might not know but should.

Later this year we’ll bring you a series of explanatory articles on Web Monetization. This project, Web Monetization for the Arts, is funded by Grant for the Web. (Yes, we received a grant!) Are you an artist or arts administrator looking to make money from your digital content? This series of articles and tutorials will show you how.

You can find our E-books at Raft. And we mean to keep in better touch via our Editor’s Notes such as this one.

If you are a writer and your work was published at criticalread.org, the link to your work will remain the same. We will be archiving the old site. You may request to have your work moved to Raft. Contact us at mail@criticalread.org.

Writers interested in submitting essays or pitching us stories can do so using our Submittable page.

Thank you. We’re looking forward to delivering the stories of the arts to you.