A decade ago, the prevailing logic of creative culture was clear: if you made something, you should monetise it. Post to enough platforms, build an audience, find a niche, and turn the hobby into a business. That logic has not disappeared. But something is pushing back against it — a growing number of people creating specifically because they have no intention of selling what they make. The amateur is back. This time, by choice.
The Creator Economy’s Paradox
The professionalisation of creative culture produced something unexpected. The creator economy has undergone significant professionalisation: creators now run their own businesses, becoming strategic partners for brands. Creators manage KPIs, chase algorithm changes, file tax returns for sponsorship income, and optimise thumbnails for click-through rates. The most successful ones are, as one industry report puts it, “media moguls in their own right.”
That professionalisation is real. So is the exhaustion it generates. What was once an amateur pursuit or a way to top up income has now evolved into a sustainable economic model. But once a sustainable economic model arrives, it brings with it all the pressures of a sustainable economic model. Patreon’s research found that 53% of creators report it is harder to reach their fans than it was five years ago. Audiences have fragmented. Algorithms prioritise scale. The creative act increasingly competes with the business act — and for many people, the business act is winning.
The response, in parts of Europe at least, is not to optimise harder. It is to opt out of the optimisation altogether.
Zines and the Return of the Unmonetised
Gen Z is reviving print culture — seeking authenticity, creativity, and a break from digital fatigue. There appears to be a rise in anti-intellectualism online, prompting young people to look offline for media that helps them escape the mental fatigue of their digital lives.
In Ireland, young people are making DIY publications not to build audiences but to think, connect, and hold something physical in their hands. Meanwhile, independent zine shops and fairs have proliferated in Milan. Sweden’s CUTZINE fest celebrates DIY culture and political art. Similar zine fairs also take place annually in Rotterdam and Oslo.
The zine is a useful lens precisely because it is so deliberately uncommercial. You cannot algorithmically optimise a photocopied booklet stapled in someone’s kitchen. Its value is entirely in the making and the exchange — not the reach, the analytics, or the revenue. That is, for a generation raised on metrics, a genuinely radical position.
As explored in “Buying New No Longer Feels Necessary,” the shift away from accumulation and toward participation is visible across multiple domains simultaneously. The zine is one cultural form of that shift. It says: the point is the process, not the product.
Community Choirs and the Social Function of Making
The same logic operates at a different scale in community choirs. London’s Some Voices grew from a small singing group to over 1,200 members after 2020. In Serbia, an amateur choir network has expanded to approximately 2,000 participants across the country. These are not people training for professional careers. Almost none of them will perform on a stage for money.
The appeal of the community choir is precisely its separation from professional ambition. You show up, you sing with strangers, you leave. Nobody is building a brand. Nobody is content-capturing the rehearsal for Instagram. The experience is complete in itself — bounded, social, and pleasurable without any requirement that it become anything more.
This connects to a broader argument about why humans make things at all. As explored in “Why Adults Need Hobbies Again,” the research consistently shows that activities done for their own sake — with no external reward or performance pressure — produce significantly better wellbeing outcomes than activities done for recognition or income. The choir is not a stepping stone. It is the destination.
The Influencer as Warning Sign
The influencer is, in retrospect, both the peak of the professionalisation logic and its most visible cautionary tale. The aspiration to turn creative output into income is legitimate. But the creator economy’s maturation has made the commercial terms increasingly unfavourable for new entrants. Algorithm changes, platform saturation, and the sheer volume of content competing for attention have made “going viral” progressively less reliable as a path to sustainable income.
The more significant cultural effect is what happened to the relationship between making and sharing. When the default assumption is that creative output should be monetised, the act of making something for oneself becomes almost countercultural. The person who writes in a journal and never posts it, who paints and keeps the paintings, who sings in a choir that never records anything — these people are not failing at the creator economy. They are choosing not to participate in its logic.
Making Without Monetising
What the zine revival, the choir boom, and the broader return of amateur culture share is a refusal to treat creative activity as a means to an end. The end is the activity itself. That sounds simple. In a cultural economy built entirely around converting attention into revenue, it is surprisingly difficult to maintain.
As explored in “The Queue Became Part of the Experience” and “Luxury Is No Longer Rare. Access Is.,” the experiences people are willing to invest time and effort in — without guaranteed return — are increasingly the ones that feel most valuable. The amateur choir rehearsal that nobody streamed. The zine that reached forty people. The painting that lives in a drawer. These are not failures of distribution. They are deliberate choices about what creativity is for.
The most radical thing you can do, right now, is create something nobody pays for. Not because it will become valuable later. Because the making is the point.
Key Sources
- TechCrunch, “‘For You’ feeds are not for creators, Patreon says”: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/for-you-feeds-are-not-for-creators-patreon-says/
- The Irish Times, “Gen-Zine: young people ditching digital for DIY publications”: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/03/08/gen-zine-young-people-are-ditching-digital-for-home-made-publications-and-community/
- The Spectator, “Why Gen Z are singing the praises of community choirs”: https://spectator.com/article/why-gen-z-are-singing-the-praises-of-community-choirs/
- AP News, “A growing amateur choir brings joy and community to hundreds in Serbia”: https://apnews.com/article/f183c7970d5ac5d2f9b817e3f92af058
- Istituto Marangoni, “Gen Z and Zine Culture: The Return of Print”: https://www.istitutomarangoni.com/en/maze35/research/gen-z-print-magazine-comeback
- BNP Paribas, “The Creator Economy is expected to be worth €135 billion in Europe by 2032”: https://group.bnpparibas/en/news/the-creator-economy-is-expected-to-be-worth-eur135-billion-in-europe-by-2032
- ExchangeWire, “The Creator Economy in 2026”: https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2025/12/16/the-creator-economy-in-2026-tapping-into-culture-community-credibility-and-craft/
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