Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers (NAICS 7115)

A Histometrics industry-group primer for public- and private-market investors

1. Overview

NAICS 7115 is the freelance creative economy at the "industry group" level: individual actors, producers, directors, writers, journalists, dancers, visual artists, public speakers, art restorers, technical crew, and celebrity and athlete endorsers who sell their own talent project by project rather than as salaried staff [1]. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is the U.S. government's standard for grouping businesses; a four-digit "industry group" sits one level above the five- and six-digit industries beneath it.

This is a single-child pass-through: NAICS 7115 contains exactly one industry, so the group is effectively identical to that child in scope, definition, and statistics. This page is a short bridge — it gives the group's own ground-truth figures and points you to the full treatment in 71151 (and its single leaf, 711510).

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

NAICS 7115 contains exactly one five-digit industry:

• 71151 — Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers (whose sole six-digit leaf is 711510).

Because the group has a single child, 7115, 71151, and 711510 are effectively the same industry measured at three levels of the code. Everything the four-digit group counts is the five-digit industry, which is the six-digit leaf. For the full analysis — investable universe, unit economics, demand drivers, regulation, consolidation, risks, and how-to-invest detail — read the 71151 primer.

One scope note worth carrying: freelance musicians and vocalists are classified separately in NAICS 711130, and agents and managers in 711410 — neither is inside 7115, even though both are central to the money flows below [1].

3. Size (this level's rollup figures)

The figures below are our ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 7115. Because the group has one child, they equal the 71151 / 711510 numbers.

That is roughly 1.7 employees per establishment [2] — a figure shaped by "loan-out" corporations, where a single high-earning performer is the company's only "employee."

Concentration. This is about as fragmented as federal data gets. The four largest firms hold just 2.2% of receipts (a measure called CR4), the top eight 3.7% (CR8), the top twenty 6.9% (CR20), and the top fifty 11% (CR50). The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) — a standard concentration gauge that runs to 10,000 — is 3.3, essentially zero [3].

The undercount caveat — the most important point in this section. County Business Patterns and the Economic Census count only businesses with payroll, but this industry is defined by people who have none. Census's separate Nonemployer Statistics program — self-employed individuals with no paid staff — counts on the order of 1.04 million independent-artist proprietorships (2023), the vast majority of all businesses in the industry, generating roughly $25.4 billion in receipts [4]. In other words, the ~$28.6 billion of employer receipts above captures only about half of total industry activity; the participants who define this group are largely invisible to the headline "establishment" statistics. See 71151 for the full undercount treatment.

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

There is no public company whose core business is being an independent artist — the group is a million individuals, not a set of firms, and the single child inherits that exactly. Value concentrates entirely in the adjacent businesses that clip a fee off the creative flow (full table and scale figures in 71151):

• Rights owners — Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony (Music), and pure-play Reservoir Media — for annuity-like royalty exposure.
• Monetization platforms — Spotify, Alphabet/YouTube, and freelance/stock marketplaces Fiverr, Upwork, and Getty Images.
• Live/experiential — Live Nation Entertainment, where performers earn appearance and touring income.
• Private layer — the talent "Big Three" (WME/Endeavor, CAA, UTA) and Wasserman, now largely private-equity-backed, alongside music- and literary-catalog funds and royalty marketplaces.

5. How the money works

Owners here are individual creative businesses, so unit economics blend professional services with intellectual-property (IP) licensing. Revenue is a mix of project fees / day rates, live-performance guarantees, royalties and residuals (recurring, annuity-like income from work already done), advances, audience monetization (subscriptions, tips, ads, merchandise), and endorsement fees. Fixed costs are low, but deductions are heavy: agents ~10%, managers ~15%, lawyers ~5%, plus self-employment tax and no employer benefits.

The decisive asset is IP ownership — who controls the copyright. Rights that throw off reliable royalties trade as financial assets, valued at a multiple of annual net income, which is exactly what the rights owners above are buying. The defining fact is a hit-driven, winner-take-most distribution: the aggregate pool grows steadily while any single bet on talent is extremely high-variance — which is why the durable businesses are the aggregators. See 71151 for the full mechanics.

6. Demand drivers

• Content-production spending by studios and streamers — the primary employer of independent writers, actors, and crew.
• Digital distribution — streaming, social video, podcasts, and direct-to-fan tools that widen audiences for independent work.
• Brand and advertising budgets — the source of endorsement and much creator income.
• Live experiences and catalog consumption — touring, festivals, and recorded-music royalties.
• The cycle and AI — nearly all of this is discretionary, so the group is sensitive to recessions, ad downturns, and production shutdowns; artificial intelligence (AI) is both a cost-lowering tool and a source of new supply and legal dispute.

7. Regulation

This group is shaped less by product regulation than by legal systems that decide who owns the work and how creators are paid and classified (detailed in 71151):

• Copyright — the U.S. Copyright Act turns creative output into a transferable, licensable asset; clear chain-of-title is what makes catalogs saleable.
• Royalty collection — Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) such as ASCAP and BMI license public performances and distribute royalties.
• Worker classification — whether a creator is a contractor or employee changes cost structures for the platforms and studios that hire them.
• Payment protection and disclosure — freelance-payment laws and Federal Trade Commission endorsement-disclosure rules.
• AI and the right of publicity — the fastest-moving frontier, governing unauthorized digital replicas of voice and likeness.

8. Consolidation

The defining tension is atomized supply versus consolidated demand. The talent itself is unconcentrated (HHI 3.3) with low entry barriers [3], but the buyers and intermediaries are consolidating: a handful of studios, streamers, and publishers set terms; private equity has rolled music, literary, and IP catalogs into financial portfolios; and the Big Three agencies have gone private under deep-pocketed owners. Direct-to-fan platforms are the counterweight, letting creators bypass gatekeepers — but substituting a new dependency on platform algorithms and fee take-rates. Net: the 7115 core stays fragmented and owner-operated, while consolidation clusters in the adjacent layers. See 71151 for the detail.

9. Risks

• Income volatility and the power law — the median creator earns little with no safety net; any thesis on a single talent is effectively a venture bet.
• AI substitution and appropriation — generative AI is both a threat and a live legal battleground over training data, voice, and likeness.
• Platform dependence — algorithm, payout, and fee changes, and deplatforming, can hit income quickly.
• Buyer-spend cycles — streaming pullbacks, ad recessions, and production shutdowns hit freelance income first.
• Interest rates and catalog valuations — rights portfolios are valued as multiples of royalty income; higher rates compress those multiples.
• Regulatory whiplash — worker-classification and freelance-payment rules shift across jurisdictions and administrations.

10. How to invest & outlook

Because there is no direct play, public investors buy the aggregators and rails — rights owners, monetization platforms, and live/experiential operators — and should treat each as a proxy valued on its own model, not as an interchangeable "entertainment stock." Private routes offer more direct exposure: music- and literary-catalog funds, royalty marketplaces selling fractional income streams, revenue-based creator financing, and equity in agencies and production — closer to creator income but illiquid and valuation-opaque.

Outlook. The number of independent creators keeps rising and the aggregate pool is growing (nonemployer receipts up from ~$18.9B in 2018 to ~$25.4B in 2023) [4], but the income distribution stays brutally unequal, and AI could either enlarge the licensing pie for rights owners or hollow out demand for human creative labor. The durable opportunity is not any single artist but the toll-collecting infrastructure that monetizes an ever-growing creative workforce.

Because NAICS 7115 equals its one child, the complete analysis lives one level down: read NAICS 71151 — Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers (and its leaf, 711510).

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. NAICS 711510 — Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers (definition and scope) (2022). https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=711510&input=711510&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns, NAICS 711510 (2023). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/data/datasets.html
3. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms for the U.S., NAICS 711510 (2025). https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN
4. U.S. Census Bureau. Nonemployer Statistics; "Nonemployer Businesses Are Key Contributors to Gig Activities and Economic Growth" (July 2025). https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/07/nes-gig-economy.html