The algorithmic artrepreneur: rethinking creative entrepreneurship under platform governance

Digital platforms have revolutionized creativity in many ways, offering new possibilities for audiences to access, discover, engage with, and purchase artistic work. Meanwhile, the platformization of the production of creative content has introduced algorithmic systems that increasingly mediate visibility, content circulation, audience reach, and economic opportunity. This Mini Review brings together research on arts entrepreneurship, creative work, platformization, algorithmic governance and creator labor to discuss the impact of these changes on the agency of arts entrepreneurs. It highlights the possibility of platforms to lower some traditional obstacles to artistic entrepreneurship, but also to create new forms of infrastructural dependence, namely in terms of algorithmic visibility, metricisation, platform norms and monetization systems. The review suggests that contemporary artrepreneurs operate through constrained and negotiated agency, interpreting, adapting to, and sometimes challenging platform conditions. The notion of the algorithmic artrepreneur is introduced to describe an artrepreneur whose entrepreneurial agency is reconfigured through continuous negotiation with algorithmically mediated platform infrastructures affecting visibility, audience access, content circulation and value creation. This mini review conceptualizes this agency through four interrelated dimensions: creative agency, platform agency, relational agency and entrepreneurial agency. Three tensions are highlighted: the tension between visibility as an entrepreneurial opportunity and as a form of labor, the tension between platform adaptation as an entrepreneurial strategy and as a creative constraint, and the tension between digital access as a democratization and as an infrastructural dependence. There is a need to look into algorithmic agency, visibility labor, inequality, platform diversification and sustainable creative careers in the future.