3 ms·
I've seen dozens of articles with similar headlines. I don't think anyone should be concerned with how much Spotify pays, for 2 reasons: 1. The people who made
by chjohasbrouck 11y ago
I've seen dozens of articles with similar headlines. I don't think anyone should be concerned with how much Spotify pays, for 2 reasons:
1. The people who made the music sold the rights to the music to the people who own the music, who then licensed the music to Spotify for an agreed-upon amount. Everyone agreed, presumably because this deal was beneficial for every party involved, which it most likely is otherwise Spotify wouldn't have been able to obtain licenses to almost every artist's music.
2. There will never be a shortage of art in this world, whether it's compensated monetarily or not. This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't see a big need for artists to be compensated. If they stopped being compensated, we'd just be left with a few million artists of every medium producing art for free because that's what most artists do, whether it pays or not. If they weren't compensated, there would be less mass-market art, but since the quality of art is both subjective and relative, we'd probably all be just as satisfied with it.
If you stop compensating most professions, their output drops to zero. If you stop compensating artists, they just keep producing art. One could argue that we'd get even better art if we stopped compensating artists. We'd be left with nothing but the passionate ones.
- BurningFrog 11y agoPassion is nice, but skill is at least as important. You get vastly more skilled working full time than at side projects on your spare time. You also produce much more art at whatever your quality level is working full time. Subjectively, I agree we'd still have favorite artist and enjoy their work if quality was cut 80% across the board.
- bwy 11y agoI can't believe you can say this seriously. Have you not played an instrument or drawn before? Art is in many ways relatively, but objectively, quantitatively more people enjoy listening to Mozart than Cage's 4'33", and more people enjoy Picasso than a 5 year old's finger painting. Those art things require training just like any other profession.
- cousin_it 11y agoI don't think GP's argument hinges on art enjoyment being 100% relative. Whatever kind of art you happen to enjoy, be it Mozart's string quartets or Cage's 4'33'', someone out there is making exactly that kind of art for free. The difference in quality is tiny compared to the difference in popularity. Yes, making good art requires training, but so what? These people are willing to get training, create art, and give it to you for free. You might say that it's immoral to take stuff from them for free, but that's what already happens. The overwhelming majority of artists lose money, rather than make money. If you removed artist compensation completely, fewer people would go into art hoping for the pie-in-the-sky chance of success. The overall societal loss in terms of smashed hopes etc. would become smaller. And the quality of art you consume might become higher, because you'd lose the cookie cutter commercial crap. That's how the argument goes.