Properties or characteristics of Creative Industries

A toy cat produced in a South-African township, made from used plastic bags and old wire
According to Caves (2000), creative industries are characterized by 7 economic properties:
1. Nobody knows principle: Demand uncertainty exists because consumer reactions to a product are neither known beforehand, nor easily understood afterwards.
2. Art for art’s sake: Workers care about originality, technical professional skill, harmony, etc. of creative goods and are willing to settle for lower wages than offered by 'humdrum' jobs.
3. Motley crew principle: For relative complex creative products (e.g., films), the production requirs diversely skilled inputs. Each skilled input must be present and perform at some minimum level to produce a valuable outcome.
4. Infinite variety: Products are differentiated by quality and by uniqueness: each product is a distinct combination of inputs leading to infinite variety options.
5. A list/B list: Skills are vertically differentiated. Artists are ranked on their skills, originality, and proficiency in creative processes and/or products. Small differences in skills and talent may yield huge differences in (financial) success.
6. Time flies: When coordinating complex projects with diversely skilled inputs, time is of the essence.
7. Ars longa: Some creative products have durability aspects that invoke copyright protection, allowing a creator or performer to collect rents.
The properties of Caves have been criticized for being too rigid (Towse, 2000). Not all creative workers are purely driven by 'art for art's sake'. The 'ars longa' property also holds for certain noncreative products (i.e., licensed products). The 'time flies' property also holds for large construction projects. Creative industries are therefore not unique, but they score generally higher on these properties relative to non-creative industries.