The Global Economy Is Buying Culture. The Supply Chain Is Broken.
Global economies already buy culture through tourism, experience and creative services. The missing layer is a better route to local artists and cultural operators.
Why does everyone think I’m running a charity? If one more person assumes I’m running a charity, I may actually scream.
I am not joking. The strange thing is that if you actually look at the numbers, it is almost the other way around. The system is subsidised by us. By artists, cultural workers, independent operators and the spaces that keep producing the cultural value entire economies use to attract visitors, sell experiences and make places feel like somewhere rather than nowhere.
The global economy is already buying culture. It just keeps calling it something else.
It calls it tourism, visitor experience, brand activation, destination marketing, hospitality, placemaking, live entertainment, community engagement or experiential strategy. The language changes depending on who is writing the brief. The demand does not. People want access to the artists, spaces, stories, references and strange little ecosystems that make a place specific.
UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook reported US$1.4 trillion in creative services exports and US$713 billion in creative goods exports in 2022. The World Bank estimates that travel and tourism contributed US$10.9 trillion to the global economy in 2024 and supported around 357 million jobs. UNESCO estimates that cultural and creative industries account for approximately 3.1% of global GDP and 6.2% of employment. These figures use different definitions, so they should not be added together. They do make one thing clear: culture is not a cute side project waiting for the economy to take it seriously.
The system wants the vibe. It does not want the invoice.
A brand wants local credibility, so it hires an agency. A destination wants cultural relevance, so it buys a campaign. A hotel wants a better guest experience, so it asks for local recommendations. A venue wants a stronger programme, so it calls the same people it already knows. The money exists. The route into the local cultural economy is just fragmented, private and weirdly difficult to use.
This is not me saying every agency or intermediary is useless. Good producers, curators, strategists and agencies do important work. The problem is that artists, independent spaces and cultural operators are too often treated as raw material instead of suppliers with knowledge, relationships, pricing, authorship and negotiating power.
The system wants the authenticity generated by independent culture, but it would quite like that authenticity to remain cheap, grateful and administratively invisible.
Please stop building more event software
I have lived this disconnect between New York and Berlin. Everywhere you look, people are lonelier, more disconnected and more bored, while our physical and digital experiences become increasingly sanitised and interchangeable. We crave the rawness of actual subculture because it keeps us human. Then we build systems that crush the spaces and people producing it.
And no, we do not need another event software platform asking everyone to upload themselves into a database and wait. AI will probably do the calendar part soon anyway. What is missing is not another place to list an event. It is better infrastructure between people who need cultural work and the people already capable of doing it.
What happened at Klunkerkranich
The Klunkerkranich collaboration in Berlin is a small but very real example. The venue had a commercial and cultural need. Countercult had the relationships, local context and network of artists and musicians needed to make a programme that actually belonged in the setting.
The artists were paid. The invoices were sent. The average rate was around €50 per hour per artist. This should not sound radical, but apparently we still need to make a whole argument for it.
The value also continued beyond the night itself. Countercult’s events have consistently led to more gigs and jobs for Countercult and for the people who attend. A venue operator meets a musician. An artist is recommended for another commission. An attendee becomes a client. The room becomes useful because the right people are in it and the relationships do not disappear when the event ends.
The value is not only in the event. It is in the network of future work the event makes possible.
The cultural worker cannot be the whole supply chain
A cultural worker should not have to be an artist, producer, sales person, account manager, researcher, venue scout, compliance department and unpaid cultural translator every time an organisation wants to work locally.
A better cultural supply chain needs discoverability, context, trust, clear roles, fair terms, procurement routes, payment and repeat demand. It does not mean turning a scene into a catalogue of available talent. It means making local culture easier to work with without flattening it, extracting from it or asking everyone involved to absorb all of the risk.
This is where Countercult Network and Countercult Studios sit. The public network helps people discover artists, spaces, places and local culture. Studios does the paid work of research, curation, creative direction, production, commissioning and relationship-building that makes that network useful to a specific commercial or institutional brief.
The money is already moving
The global creative economy does not need another person explaining why culture matters. The money is already moving through it. The question is whether more of that money can reach the people and spaces generating the value, or whether it will keep being swallowed by layers of marketing language while the cultural ecosystem is left to starve.
Stop treating local culture like a marketing afterthought or a soft funding problem. It is a local supply chain. It creates jobs, demand, identity, visitor spend, relationships and future work. The people producing that value deserve more than applause, exposure and a grant application.
They deserve infrastructure, contracts and a fair route to the money already moving through the economy.
Have a place, tourism, or cultural-development brief?
Countercult Studios works as a contractor or specialist delivery partner on research, mapping, cultural strategy, campaigns, experiences, commissions, archives, and production.
An original Countercult field note on the global creative economy, enterprise demand, cultural supply chains, and the Klunkerkranich collaboration in Berlin. Macro figures referenced from the World Bank’s Tourism overview, UNESCO’s Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report, and UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook 2024: https://www.worldbank.org/ext/en/topic/tourism, https://www.unesco.org/reports/reshaping-creativity/2022/en, and https://unctad.org/publication/creative-economy-outlook-2024
This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.
editorial process: Our Journals are pulled from our writings over the years to get information out as quickly and as widely as possible, and to get to what matters: finding each other and claiming our seat in the circular economy. Some ideas overlap between Shona Neary's work on cultural infrastructure and their artist practice as Sketchy Shona. AI is a tool for infrastructure, not for creating Journal writing or artists' work. We welcome original reporting and pitches from journalists and independent publishers.