It would be nice if that were true.
AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might.
Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
I know quite a few extremely talented artists who could never crack the marketing, and so nobody else has ever heard of them. Even local fame requires a fair bit of hustle. Talent alone doesn't get you there.
In the real world there is no If You Build It They Will Come, you've got to get the word out
Isn’t this the point of the unique & real discovery process that actual connoisseurs of an art form participate in? We find you (great artist), because you are brilliant at your art but terrible at marketing.
Then you might become popular because 1) we (the finders, the influencers) talk about you (I mean personally here, friend to friend, in person, not social media) and 2) if your art has broad appeal, it just needed the marketing. word of mouth marketing is the most authentic kind so of course it’s being faked!
There are many artists that I love that “no one has ever heard of” and that’s fine! At some point, some of them will make something with broad appeal and it’ll catch on.
There’s money at stake so of course people are trying to juice the process, but that’s been going on for a very long time, hence my original reference to payola (pay to play on radio) which started in the 1930s!
None of this payola bullshit takes anything away from the true talent producing amazing art today! It just means, as it always has, that if you want the good stuff you have to do your own research. Most are too lazy and that’s fine! They have other interests. But the art form itself does not suffer because there exist grifters who distort mass perception. Connoisseurs are less interested in mass perception.
Agreed 100%, which is why my local city's (Brisbane) post-rock scene of the 2000s-2010s was so important to me
But it's also why despite being phenomenal musicians, they all worked normal jobs (even those related bands who were indie-rock enough to be played on Triple J even though they weren't) and they've all stopped playing because touring loses money.
I will always have the music and the years of amazing experiences and the photos of the shows I took, but hyper-local means niche and niche means unsustainable, I think.
And then commerce is commerce, and you make money and more money means you did something good.
And then you put the two together and it’s the same shit we’ve seen for thousands of years. tbh no surprises! This is all as expected.
There’s still phenomenal live music in every city I’ve ever visited, to the present day. Just go out and find it, it’s not hard!
Support live local music
From the article:
> "...it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”
What is this trying to say? For every 1 person who thinks about truth in some independent way, I don't care if it's spiritual or because they do scientific tests for what the best music is or all of this other stuff; there are 19 people who are, "LIKES = TRUTH".
Are you getting it? That has nothing to do with payola or authenticity or scarcity or whatever. You have no idea anyway, you've never had to make a creative product. Likes = truth. Authenticity is the seeming unlikelihood that social media content authors are bought and sold. It's the OPPOSITE of what you think. It is the OPPOSITE of payola. And look, they're right. The vast majority of opinions on TikTok are not paid for. This is the OPPOSITE of radio.
sounds like pop culture = art
which is obviously not true