[Ludleth19]

Agreed, I feel like this attitude comes from people who consume content but never have tried to make and disseminate anything themselves. I genuinely feel so bad for anyone making music the last 10/15 years, it's been so undervalued socially and from within the recording/streaming industry itself.

[tivert]

> Agreed, I feel like this attitude comes from people who consume content but never have tried to make and disseminate anything themselves.

Yeah, I agree. I think most absolutist rejections of copyright and intellectual property are, at their core, a reaction against attempts to prevent piracy the person wants to engage in. Maybe mixed in with some misplaced Free Software idealism (that ignores stuff like the fact that copyright is the literal foundation of Free Software).

[zirgs]

Attempts to prevent piracy are laughable and ineffective. Even North Korea can't fully prevent imports of Western cultural products.

This is why the music industry gave up and now we have services like Tidal, Spotify and Youtube.

[zirgs]

That's because the musicians flooded the market. Good music isn't rare and it is not hard to find it. Spotify has 100M tracks - even if 99% of them were crap - that would still mean that there are 1 million good songs. More than you can listen in a lifetime.

[Ludleth19]

>Good music isn't rare and it is not hard to find it.

I think you and I may have different standards and taste. I don't disagree that there's plenty of good stuff being made, but a lot of it is hard to find and sorting through all the chaff is a gigantic pain.

This just points to the broader issue I was getting at in my previous comment. Record labels have never been great for artists, but they've pretty much abdicated any value they brought as a sort of filter awhile ago and have handed that off to algorithms that are questionable at best.

Quality also isn't always rewarded "fairly" or given a fair chance to catch on with a different market than whatever insular scene it exists within- this is compounded further via the insular nature of online groups too. Music labels and streaming platforms offer basically no support to musicians and groups who need it the most and who could benefit from a more hands on approach, and instead defer all their resources onto a few golden geese, because its safe and pays the bills.

This is short sighted though and creates an atmosphere of stagnation- a similar process is happening in film as well, culture is just being mediated by algorithms and markets, which is why culture has become so stagnant, predictable, boring, and circular.