It’s true that most of that live-­music revenue is captured by superstar acts like Taylor Swift or the Rolling Stones. In 1982, the musical 1-­percenters took in only 26 percent of the total revenues generated by live music; in 2003, they captured 56 percent of the market, with the top 5 percent of musicians capturing almost 90 percent of live revenues. But this winner-­takes-­all trend seems to have preceded the digital revolution; most 1-­percenters achieved their gains in the ’80s and early ’90s, as the concert business matured into a promotional machine oriented around marquee world tours. In the post-­Napster era, there seems to have been a swing back in a more egalitarian direction. According to one source, the top 100 tours of 2000 captured 90 percent of all revenue, while today the top 100 capture only 43 percent.

The growth of live music isn’t great news for the Brian Wilsons of the world, artists who would prefer to cloister themselves in the studio, endlessly tinkering with the recording process in pursuit of a masterpiece. The new economics of the post-­Napster era are certainly skewed toward artists who like to perform in public. But we should remember one other factor here that is often forgotten. The same technological forces that have driven down the price of recorded music have had a similar effect on the cost of making an album in the first place. We easily forget how expensive it was to produce and distribute albums in the pre-­Napster era. In a 2014 keynote speech at an Australian music conference, the indie producer and musician Steve Albini observed: ‘‘When I started playing in bands in the ’70s and ’80s, most bands went through their entire life cycle without so much as a note of their music ever being recorded.’’ Today, musicians can have software that emulates the sound of Abbey Road Studios on their laptops for a few thousand dollars. Distributing music around the world — a process that once required an immense global corporation or complex regional distribution deals — can now be performed by the artist herself while sitting in a Starbucks, simply through the act of uploading a file.

The vast machinery of promoters and shippers and manufacturers and A&R executives that sprouted in the middle of the 20th century, fueled by the profits of those high-­margin vinyl records and CDs, has largely withered away. What remains is a more direct relationship between the musicians and their fans. That new relationship has its own demands: the constant touring and self-­promotion, the Kickstarter campaigns that have raised $153 million dollars to date for music-­related projects, the drudgery that inevitably accompanies a life without handlers. But the economic trends suggest that the benefits are outweighing the costs. More people are choosing to make a career as a musician or a songwriter than they did in the glory days of Tower Records.

Of the big four creative industries (music, television, movies and books), music turns out to be the business that has seen the most conspicuous turmoil: None of the other three has seen anywhere near the cratering of recorded-­music revenues. The O.E.S. numbers show that writers and actors each saw their income increase by about 50 percent, well above the national average. According to the Association of American Publishers, total revenues in the fiction and nonfiction book industry were up 17 percent from 2008 to 2014, following the introduction of the Kindle in late 2007. Global television revenues have been projected to grow by 24 percent from 2012 to 2017. For actors and directors and screenwriters, the explosion of long-form television narratives has created a huge number of job opportunities. (Economic Modeling Specialists International reports that the number of self-­employed actors has grown by 45 percent since 2001.) If you were a television actor looking for work on a multiseason drama or comedy in 2001, there were only a handful of potential employers: the big four networks and HBO and Showtime. Today there are Netflix, Amazon, AMC, Syfy, FX and many others.

What about the economics of quality? Perhaps there are more musicians than ever, and the writers have collectively gotten a raise, but if the market is only rewarding bubble-­gum pop and ‘‘50 Shades Of Grey’’ sequels, there’s a problem. I think we can take it as a given that television is exempt from this concern: Shows like ‘‘Game Of Thrones,’’ ‘‘Orange Is The New Black,’’ ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ and so on confirm that we are living through a golden age of TV narrative. But are the other forms thriving artistically to the same degree?

Look at Hollywood, and at first blush the picture is deeply depressing. More than half of the highest grossing movies of 2014 were either superhero films or sequels; it’s clearly much harder to make a major-­studio movie today that doesn’t involve vampires, wizards or Marvel characters. This has led a number of commentators and filmmakers to publish eulogies for the classic midbudget picture. ‘‘Back in the 1980s and 1990s,’’ Jason Bailey wrote on Flavorwire, ‘‘it was possible to finance — either independently or via the studio system — midbudget films (anywhere from $5 million to $60 million) with an adult sensibility. But slowly, quietly, over roughly the decade and a half since the turn of the century, the paradigm shifted.’’ Movies like ‘‘Blue Velvet,’’ ‘‘Do the Right Thing’’ or ‘‘Pulp Fiction’’ that succeeded two or three decades ago, the story goes, would have had a much harder time in the current climate. Steven Soderbergh apparently felt so strongly about the shifting environment that he abandoned theatrical moviemaking altogether last year.

Is Bailey’s criticism really correct? If you make a great midbudget film in 2015, is the marketplace less likely to reward your efforts than it was 15 years ago? And has it become harder to make such a film? Cinematic quality is obviously more difficult to measure than profits or employment levels, but we can attempt an estimate of artistic achievement through the Rotten Tomatoes rankings, which aggregate critics’ reviews for movies. Based on my analysis, using data on box-­office receipts and budgets from IMDB, I looked at films from 1999 and 2013 that met three categories. First, they were original creations or adaptations, not based on existing franchises, and were intended largely for an adult audience; second, they had a budget below $80 million; and third, they were highly praised by the critics, as defined by their Rotten Tomatoes score — in other words, the best of the cinematic midlist. In 1999, the most highly rated films in these categories combined included ‘‘Three Kings,’’ ‘‘Being John Malkovich,’’ ‘‘American Beauty’’ and ‘‘Election.’’ The 2013 list included ‘‘12 Years a Slave,’’ ‘‘Her,’’ ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty,’’ ‘‘American Hustle’’ and ‘‘Nebraska.’’ In adjusted dollars, the class of 1999 brought in roughly $430 million at the box office. But the 2013 group took in about $20 million more. True, individual years can be misleading: All it takes is one monster hit to skew the numbers. But if you look at the blended average over a three-year window, there is still no evidence of decline. The 30 most highly rated midbudget films of 1999 to 2001 took in $1.5 billion at the domestic box office, adjusted for inflation; the class of 2011 to 2013 took in the exact same amount. Then as now, if you make a small or midsize movie that rates on the Top 10 lists of most critics, you’ll average roughly $50 million at the box office.