Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers (NAICS 711510)

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

1. Overview

This is the freelance creative economy in its rawest form: individual actors, producers, directors, writers, journalists, cartoonists, dancers, visual artists, public speakers, art restorers, set and lighting designers, recording technicians, and celebrity and athlete endorsers who sell their own talent, project by project, rather than working as salaried staff [1]. It is one of the most fragmented "industries" in the entire federal statistical system — there is no dominant firm, and in most cases the "firm" is one person.

It is not a clean public-company sector, and it should not be read as one. You cannot buy shares in a person's career, so there is no pure-play stock here. But the money these creators generate flows through a stack of investable businesses, and the health of that stack rises and falls with demand for independent creative labor. The two ways in:

• Public markets (indirect): music-rights owners and publishers, streaming and digital-distribution platforms, concert promoters and ticketing, freelance and content marketplaces, and catalog/royalty-finance vehicles.
• Private markets (more direct): equity in talent agencies and creator-management firms, music- and literary-catalog funds, royalty marketplaces that sell fractional income streams, production and tour financing, and creator-economy software.

The central distinction: creators generate scarce attention and intellectual property (IP), while the platforms, rights owners, agencies, and venues around them capture more predictable fee, royalty, or transaction revenue. Understanding the underlying industry tells you what those intermediaries are actually monetizing.

2. What it is, and how it's structured

Scope. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 711510 covers independent — i.e., freelance — individuals engaged in artistic performance, in creating artistic or cultural works, or in providing the technical expertise those works require. It explicitly includes athletes and other celebrities paid to endorse products, give speeches, or make public appearances [1].

What it excludes (the boundaries are narrow, and they matter):

• Freelance musicians and vocalists sit in NAICS 711130 (Musical Groups and Artists), not here — a genuine oddity, since a songwriter's royalty income is central to the rights business discussed below [1].
• Agents and managers for artists, athletes, and entertainers are NAICS 711410.
• Performing-arts companies and event promoters (the organizations, not the individuals) are NAICS 711110 / 711120 / 711190 / 711310 / 711320.
• Independent athletes competing in sporting events are NAICS 711219; only their endorsement and appearance work lands in 711510.
• Commercial and graphic artists, illustrators, and commercial photographers fall under design and photography codes in NAICS 541 (e.g., 541430 graphic design, 541921/541922 photography).
• Artisans and craftspeople who make physical goods are in manufacturing (Sectors 31–33).
• Record labels, recording studios, and book/newspaper publishers are in NAICS 512 and 5111 — they are the buyers and distributors, not the talent.

Ownership mix. Overwhelmingly sole proprietors and single-member limited liability companies (LLCs). A meaningful minority of successful performers incorporate a "loan-out" company — typically an S-corporation that "loans out" the star's services and of which the star is the only employee — for tax and liability reasons. That structure is why the employer-side statistics below show unusually high pay per worker. The federal business data do not publish a complete legal-form breakdown for the industry.

The typical economic chain is: creator → agent / manager / platform / publisher → brand, venue, advertiser, or consumer.

3. How big it is (and why the official employer count is misleading)

Two federal datasets describe this industry, and they tell very different stories. Our authoritative statistics cover the employer side only; the nonemployer figures below come from a separate Census program and are labeled as such.

Employer businesses — firms with at least one paid employee — are small in number:

That works out to roughly 1.7 employees per establishment and about $158,000 of payroll per employee [2] — a figure inflated by loan-out corporations, where a single high-earning performer is the company's only "employee." The $9 million Small Business Administration (SBA) threshold is a federal contracting classification, not a valuation measure [4].

The undercount — the single most important number in this section. County Business Patterns (CBP) and the Economic Census count only businesses with payroll. This industry is defined by people who have none. Census's separate Nonemployer Statistics program — businesses without paid employees, typically self-employed individuals — counts on the order of 1.04 million independent-artist proprietorships (2023), generating roughly $25.4 billion in receipts, up from about $18.9 billion in 2018 [5][6]. Those nonemployers are about 96% of all businesses in the industry. Combining the ~$28.6 billion of employer-firm receipts (2022) with the ~$25.4 billion of nonemployer receipts (2023) puts total industry activity on the order of $54 billion, with roughly half of it — and the vast majority of participants — invisible to the headline "establishment" statistics [3][5]. (The two figures span different years, so read $54 billion as an approximation.)

Average nonemployer receipts are only about $24,300 per proprietor [5] — a strong sign that much of this million-plus population treats creative work as part-time or supplemental income. Census's American Community Survey (ACS), which counts people by the industry they work in, put the 2024 workforce near 172,000, concentrated in California, New York, and Florida; the largest occupations were visual artists, writers and authors, and — reflecting how blurry the 711130/711510 line is in practice — musicians and singers [7].

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

4. The investable universe

There is no public company whose core business is being an independent artist — the industry is a million individuals, not a set of firms. Investable exposure comes from the businesses that finance, aggregate, and monetize creative output. (Tickers and scale appear here and in Section 10 only; they are proxies, not the industry itself.)

Public-company revenue is usually more diversified than any individual creator's income, but it carries its own platform, catalog, leverage, and event-execution risks.

Major private and other owners. The talent-agency layer is now almost entirely private: the "Big Three" are WME (parent Endeavor, taken private by Silver Lake in a deal that closed in 2025 valuing the company at roughly $25 billion [18]), CAA (Creative Artists Agency — Artémis, the Pinault family's holding company, became majority owner in 2023 [16]), and UTA (United Talent Agency — management retained control while EQT became the largest outside shareholder [17]). Wasserman (founder Casey Wasserman retained control after a strategic investment from Providence Equity Partners [19]) is a fast-growing fourth. Music- and literary-catalog ownership is heavily private-equity-backed: Hipgnosis (taken private and refinanced via Blackstone-backed music asset-backed securities [20]), Primary Wave, Concord, and Round Hill, plus royalty marketplaces (Royalty Exchange, JKBX) that sell fractional royalty streams. TKO Group (NYSE: TKO), which houses UFC and WWE, is a public but tangential adjacent play in sports entertainment.

5. How the money works

Owners here are individual creative businesses, so the unit economics blend professional services with intellectual-property (IP) licensing.

Revenue streams:

• Project fees / day rates — the acting job, ghostwriting contract, or speaking engagement. This behaves like billable professional services: income ≈ booking (utilization) rate × fee per project.
• Live performance — fixed guarantees, ticket-sales participation, or event-profit participation.
• Royalties and residuals — recurring, annuity-like income from work already done: book royalties, screen residuals (union-negotiated reuse payments), and performance royalties. This is the closest thing to a durable asset the creator owns.
• Advances — up-front payments (a book or catalog advance) recouped against future royalties.
• Audience monetization — subscriptions, memberships, tips, advertising, sponsorships, and merchandise on direct-to-fan platforms.
• Endorsement and appearance fees — for celebrities and athletes, often the largest line.

Cost structure and take-home. Fixed costs are low (a laptop, a home studio), but deductions are heavy: agents typically take ~10%, managers ~15%, and lawyers ~5% of gross; self-employment tax runs 15.3% on net earnings; and there are no employer-provided benefits. The economically decisive asset is IP ownership — who controls the copyright to the song, script, or book. Rights that generate reliable royalties trade as financial assets, valued at a multiple of annual net income (roughly 10–20× for desirable music catalogs), which is exactly what the rights owners in Section 4 are buying [15].

How the intermediaries clip the flow. A digital service provider (DSP) or publisher collects money from audiences or licensees, retains its contractual share, and distributes the balance to rights holders. In live events, promoters may guarantee artist payments and bear the loss if a show underperforms. For this industry the useful operating metrics are not factory utilization or bank net interest margin but: gross billings and creator payout, platform take rate, audience conversion and repeat purchasing, booking backlog and event sell-through, catalog cash generation and rights retention, and customer/platform concentration and key-person dependence.

The income distribution is the defining fact. The industry is hit-driven and winner-take-most: a few creators capture most of the money while the median participant earns very little. The data make this concrete — a wage-inequality (Gini) coefficient of about 0.58, far above the U.S. workforce average near 0.47, and average nonemployer receipts of only ~$24,300 [5][7]. For an investor, the aggregate pool grows steadily while any single bet on talent is extremely high-variance — which is precisely why the durable businesses are the aggregators (agencies, catalogs, platforms) that pool many creators and clip a fee off the top. The industry is asset-light at the creator level but becomes capital-intensive when businesses finance tours, advances, productions, or catalog acquisitions.

6. What drives demand

• Content-production spending by studios and streamers — the primary employer of independent writers, actors, and crew. When streaming budgets expand, freelance day-rates and staffing rise; when they contract, the freelance economy feels it first.
• Digital distribution. Streaming, social video, podcasts, digital publishing, and direct-to-fan tools have lowered distribution costs and widened the potential audience for independent work.
• Brand and advertising budgets — the source of endorsement, appearance, and much creator income. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) projected U.S. creator-economy ad spend of $37 billion for 2025 [8]; Goldman Sachs Research has estimated the global creator economy could approach $480 billion by 2027 [9]. Both are broader than NAICS 711510 receipts — read them as demand indicators, not industry-size estimates.
• Live experiences. Live Nation reported connecting roughly 159 million fans with more than 11,000 artists across ~55,000 events in 2025 — a sense of the scale of the live monetization channel [14].
• Catalog consumption. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported global recorded-music revenue of $31.7 billion in 2025, with paid streaming ~52% of the total [10]. These are global figures spanning rights owners outside 711510, but they show why catalogs and recurring royalty streams attract capital.
• Discretionary spending and the cycle. Nearly all of the above is discretionary, making the industry sensitive to recessions, advertising downturns, and — uniquely — to production shutdowns such as the 2023 strikes.
• Artificial intelligence (AI). AI tools can lower production costs, improve discovery, and help creators distribute — but can also increase supply, compress prices, and displace human labor, while raising unresolved disputes over training data, voice, and likeness.

7. Regulation

This industry is shaped less by product regulation than by legal systems that determine who owns the work, how creators are classified, how they're paid and what they must disclose, and — newly — whether their likeness can be synthesized.

Copyright. The U.S. Copyright Act is the foundation: it turns creative output into a transferable, licensable asset, giving owners control over reproduction, derivative works, distribution, and public performance/display (protection generally lasts the author's life plus 70 years). Registration is voluntary but strengthens enforcement, and clear chain-of-title is what makes catalogs saleable [22].

Royalty collection. Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) license public performances and distribute royalties. ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) distributed about $1.70 billion to its 1-million-plus members in 2024 on roughly $1.84 billion of revenue; rival BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) was acquired by private-equity firm New Mountain Capital (closed February 2024) and shifted to a for-profit model, retaining a larger slice of collections [21] — a notable financialization of royalty flows. For screen and stage creators, residual formulas are set by union contracts rather than PROs.

Worker classification. Whether a creator is an independent contractor or an employee is contested and consequential. California's AB5 (effective 2020) imposed a strict "ABC test"; the follow-up AB2257 carved out freelance writers, editors, and photographers and removed an earlier per-client submissions cap, subjecting them instead to the more flexible Borello control test [23]. Federal rules under the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) swing with administrations — the DOL moved in 2026 to rescind its 2024 independent-contractor rule and replace it with a different economic-reality analysis; classification remains fact-specific and also varies by state [27].

Payment protection. New York's statewide Freelance Isn't Free Act (effective August 2024) requires a written contract for freelance work worth $800 or more, mandates payment within 30 days, and provides double damages and attorneys' fees for violations — a template other states are following [24].

Advertising disclosure. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires creators to clearly disclose material connections to brands (payment, free products, employment, or family ties). Responsibility can remain with the creator even when an agency or brand is involved — directly relevant, since paid endorsers sit squarely inside 711510 [25].

Taxes. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) treats independent creators as self-employed: they owe self-employment tax, file 1099-NEC income, and generally make estimated payments [26]. Loan-out corporations change the treatment. The Section 199A qualified-business-income deduction is limited for higher-earning "specified service" performers, and a narrow Qualified Performing Artist deduction exists for lower-income performers.

AI and the right of publicity — the fastest-moving frontier. The U.S. Copyright Office has held that purely AI-generated works are not copyrightable absent human authorship and has recommended federal protection against unauthorized digital replicas [22]. Tennessee's ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, effective July 2024) was the first U.S. law targeting unauthorized AI voice clones, and the federal NO FAKES Act — advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2026 — would create a nationwide right to control digital replicas of one's voice and likeness [28]. This body of law will heavily influence how much of the AI content wave creators can capture versus be displaced by.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The defining tension is between atomized supply and consolidated demand. The talent itself is unconcentrated (HHI 3.3) — no one controls the supply of creativity, and entry barriers are low: a creator can begin with limited equipment, a home studio, online distribution, and a personal network [3]. But the buyers and intermediaries are consolidating:

• Buy-side concentration. A handful of studios, streamers, and publishers set terms for most professional creative work. That oligopsony power — and creators' loss of leverage as streaming replaced back-end residuals — drove the 2023 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike (May–September) and SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) actors' strike (July–November). The settlements delivered higher streaming residuals, minimum staffing, and — critically — AI guardrails; the SAG-AFTRA deal alone was valued at more than $1 billion in compensation and benefits [29][30].
• Rights consolidation. Private equity and strategic buyers spent the 2020s rolling music, literary, and IP catalogs into financial portfolios (Reservoir, Blackstone/Hipgnosis, Primary Wave, Concord), and even the royalty-collection plumbing has been financialized (BMI's sale) [20][21]. Songwriter and author income streams now trade like fixed-income assets.
• Agency consolidation. The Big Three agencies have gone private under deep-pocketed owners (Silver Lake, Artémis, EQT), concentrating representation power [16][17][18].
• Platform disintermediation — the counterweight. Direct-to-fan platforms let creators bypass gatekeepers, but substitute a new dependency: the platform controls distribution, the algorithm, and the fee take-rate, and can change terms or deplatform at will.

The net picture: the 711510 core stays structurally fragmented and owner-operated, while consolidation clusters in the adjacent layers — rights administration, distribution, representation, event infrastructure, and financing.

9. Risks

• Income volatility and the power law. The median creator earns little and has no safety net; individual outcomes are extremely high-variance [5][7]. Any thesis on a single talent is effectively a venture bet.
• AI substitution and appropriation. Generative AI is both a threat (cheaper synthetic writing, voices, and images displacing paid work) and a live legal battleground. Training-data litigation is unresolved — The New York Times v. OpenAI is ongoing, while an authors' suit against Anthropic (Bartz v. Anthropic) settled for about $1.5 billion, roughly $3,000 per work [31]. Outcomes will reallocate large sums between AI developers and creators.
• Platform dependence. Algorithm changes, payout-formula changes, fee hikes, and deplatforming can hit creator (and platform) income quickly.
• Buyer-spend cycles. Streaming budget pullbacks, advertising recessions, and production shutdowns hit freelance income first and hardest.
• Rights disputes and key-person risk. Weak contracts, unclear ownership, infringement claims, or incomplete royalty reporting can destroy asset value; agencies, catalogs, and creator businesses can hinge on a single founder or star.
• Interest rates and catalog valuations. Rights portfolios are valued as multiples of royalty income; higher rates compress those multiples and cooled the catalog-acquisition boom (a factor in Hipgnosis's troubles) — a direct risk to the rights-owner stocks.
• Regulatory whiplash. Worker-classification and freelance-payment laws shift across jurisdictions and administrations, changing cost structures for the platforms and studios that hire creators.
• Live-event execution and financial fragility. Cancellations, guarantees, weather, and venue costs affect returns; many operators lack cash reserves or benefits. Piracy and reputation shocks round out the list.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes. Because there is no direct play, public investors buy the aggregators and rails — and should treat them as proxies, not the industry, and value each on its own model rather than as interchangeable "entertainment stocks":

• Rights owners (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony, Reservoir Media) for annuity-like royalty exposure. Judge them on organic royalty growth, streaming growth, catalog durability, acquisition multiples, leverage, and cost of capital [12][13][15].
• Monetization platforms (Spotify, Alphabet/YouTube, Fiverr, Upwork, Getty Images) for exposure to the volume of creative work and the take-rate on it. Watch user growth, engagement, pricing, royalty/content costs, and creator payout [11].
• Live/experiential (Live Nation) for the appearance-and-touring channel. Watch attendance, ticket economics, event guarantees, sponsorship, and seasonality [14].

Compare valuations appropriately — price-to-sales, enterprise value to EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), or free-cash-flow yield — but do not price a subscription platform, a concert promoter, and a music-catalog owner on the same assumptions.

Private routes. More direct exposure: music- and literary-catalog funds; royalty marketplaces (Royalty Exchange, JKBX) selling fractional income streams; revenue-based financing (RBF) for creators with verifiable cash flows; equity in agencies, management, and production; debt secured by contracts, receivables, or established catalogs; and software/payments/rights-administration infrastructure. These align more closely with creator income but are illiquid and valuation-opaque. Diligence should center on documented ownership history, contract terms, recapture rights, royalty statements, platform concentration, tax records, insurance, succession, and key-person risk.

Near-term drivers (forward-looking judgments):

1. Streaming price increases are lifting the royalty pools that flow to rights owners — a tailwind for the catalog stocks.
2. AI is the central wildcard. If licensing regimes (voluntary deals plus laws like the NO FAKES Act) force AI developers to pay for training data and likenesses, rights owners gain a large new revenue line; if fair-use rulings favor developers, creator income is pressured [9][28][31].
3. Interest-rate path. Lower rates would revive catalog M&A and multiples; higher-for-longer keeps them subdued.
4. Post-strike content-spend normalization and the advertising cycle set freelance demand.
5. Regulation — worker-classification and freelance-payment laws — reshapes the cost base for hiring platforms and studios.

Bottom line. 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; a creator economy plausibly nearing half a trillion dollars globally by 2027) [6][9]. But the income distribution remains brutally unequal, and AI could either enlarge the licensing pie for rights owners or hollow out demand for human creative labor. For investors, the durable opportunity is not any single artist but the toll-collecting infrastructure — rights, representation, and platforms — that monetizes a million-strong, ever-growing creative workforce. The 711510 core itself should stay fragmented, owner-operated, and largely inaccessible through public equities; prefer durable, diversified cash flows over exposure dependent on one creator, one platform, or one hit.

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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. Small Business Administration. Table of Small Business Size Standards (2023). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
5. U.S. Census Bureau. Nonemployer Statistics (program and FAQ) (2025). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics/about/faq.html
6. U.S. Census Bureau. 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
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9. Goldman Sachs Research. The Creator Economy Could Approach Half-a-Trillion Dollars by 2027 (2023). https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-creator-economy-could-approach-half-a-trillion-dollars-by-2027
10. International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Global Music Report 2026 (2026). https://www.ifpi.org/global-music-report-2026-global-recorded-music-revenues-grow-6-4-as-record-companies-drive-innovation/
11. Spotify Technology S.A. 2025 Form 20-F (2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1639920/000162828026006874/ck0001639920-20251231.htm
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16. TPG. CAA and Artémis Announce Artémis as New Majority Shareholder of CAA (2023). https://www.tpg.com/news-and-insights/creative-artists-agency-and-artemis-pinault-familys-investment
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18. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Endeavor Group Holdings Take-Private Transaction (Silver Lake) (2025). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1766363/000119312525060949/d928498d8k.htm
19. Providence Equity Partners. Providence Invests in Wasserman (2022). https://www.provequity.com/news/providence-invests-wasserman
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21. Music Business Worldwide. ASCAP 2024 revenue and distributions; BMI acquired by New Mountain Capital (2024). https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ascaps-payouts-to-songwriters-and-publishers-rose-6-5-to-1-7bn-in-2024-as-membership-soared-past-1m-mark/
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28. Holland & Knight. NO FAKES Act (2026) and Tennessee ELVIS Act (2024) — digital-replica and right-of-publicity law. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/06/senate-judiciary-committee-advances-legislation-to-protect-name
29. Variety. WGA New Contract After Strike: AI, Writers Room Staffs, Residuals (2023). https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/wga-new-contract-strike-ai-writers-room-staffs-residuals-1235736648/
30. 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike — settlement terms and valuation (2023–2024). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_SAG-AFTRA_strike
31. Harvard Law Review and contemporaneous reporting. AI-copyright litigation: NYT v. OpenAI (ongoing); Bartz v. Anthropic authors settlement (~$1.5B) (2024–2026). https://harvardlawreview.org/