But the audience does desperately want to be entertained. And while you could make a modest return on a modest investment some years ago, and iterate on larger budgets if you had a reasonable amount of skill and talent, that has become very much more difficult because the internet has disrupted things.
Good side, you can now make money on sites like Youtube, and the technical barriers to entry are low, so there is enormous upside potential. Bad side, that probably means short-form lowest-common-denominator stuff. Great if you are happy churning out episodes of Annoying Orange, a disaster if your goal is to make feature films. You end up with a 'superstar economy' where a small number of films make $$$$ and a much larger number make little or nothing. This was always the case to some extent but the internet has seriously exacerbated it.
Yes, the audience wants to be entertained. And they are being entertained, to the extend that the entertainment market is oversaturated and as such the value of entertainment goes down.
I feel like your second paragraph is just a reiteration of what it is like for someone who wants to produce something that is not valued by the majority of his apparent market. We do not really care too much about this in other markets and we should not do so in entertainment. If what he is doing is so incredibly great, he might try crowdfunding, patronship or another form of sponsorship - it has worked great for the artists of our history.
I think my point is, you can't demand to be paid for producing something you want to produce. It's a game of supply/demand.
Well, my underlying point is that you can't demand to be paid, (and never could), but that doesn't justify people infringing copyright and then using the fact of that infringement driving down the value to say that the product is worthless.
The infringement isn't driving down the value. Market saturation and lack of scarcity are driving down the value. Copyright is an artificial construction, an attempt to create scarcity where there is none.
Copyright infringement is, in most cases, the result of asking too much money for a product that has very little intrinsic value and the addition of customer-unfriendly measures to legal alternatives (read: DRM and all its woes).
Good side, you can now make money on sites like Youtube, and the technical barriers to entry are low, so there is enormous upside potential. Bad side, that probably means short-form lowest-common-denominator stuff. Great if you are happy churning out episodes of Annoying Orange, a disaster if your goal is to make feature films. You end up with a 'superstar economy' where a small number of films make $$$$ and a much larger number make little or nothing. This was always the case to some extent but the internet has seriously exacerbated it.