Cheap EVs flooding the market is what American car companies deserve but if it’s all garbage wish . Com versions of Teslas then American consumers don’t deserve to have yet another disposable commodity forced on them.

China doesn’t make crap, that is very very outdated perspective on Chinese goods. Chinese corporations isn’t necessarily in the business of ensuring quality control all the way up the production chain, but more luxurious brands still make all their shit in China too, they just (sometimes) add an additional layer of quality control on top of the Chinese method of industrial production.

I am sure there are absolutely shit Chinese EVs, but I am absolutely sure that there are also extremely nice affordable economy Chinese EVs, because China is a massive country and has countless different industrial production chains. It is simply a matter of doing the work to figure out which ones are producing quality EVs and which ones aren’t, same as buying any other product directly from China instead of having a western brand do the work of finding the quality products being produced in China for you and relabeling it with their brand.

Making music about money (like you continue to do) instead of about fun (like a good number of artists who aren’t topping charts do) makes it very difficult to balance what an artist should get paid against what consumers can afford to pay (assuming we remove all middle layers).

I am focusing on money because I think it is wrong the society exploits artists for their labor and then tells itself this is fine to do because artists love what they do.

Making music because money is the worst reason to make music, I don’t dispute that (why would I?) but that means for 99% of extremely talented musicians that they can’t devote very much time outside of day their job that pays the bills to make music. I want musicians to get materially rewarded for the labor of creating recorded music so they can afford to divert time from their day job to do it.

The math is very simple, every dollar less that a musician can realistically get from recording music is a dollar they have to make up elsewhere (especially in an environment where, at least in the US where I live, most people are on an economic knife edge and are one or two disasters away from their life spiraling out of control), and even if the amount of money an average moderately successful musician could realistically make even without a middleman like Spotify taking the lion’s share (to say the least), every dollar more a musician makes from their recording hobby on the side is one step closer to that musician being able to invest real time and energy to their craft (not just the vanishing amount of energy left over after they have paid the bills).

I live in the US, people cannot afford to devote actual energy and time into something unless it is their job or they are young and have a huge amount of extra energy. This is why I keep talking about money, it isn’t because I think musicians should approach music from a cynical money-making perspective, quite the opposite I want to live in a socialized society where housing, healthcare and basic necessities are provided as a baseline, so people can choose to develop their musicianship and audio engineering skills into professional careers without feeling like they are buying scratch tickets for a lottery they are likely never going to win anything from.

All of these comments about CCP subsidies and flooding the market with cheap goods are hilarious, considering fossil fuels have received several trillion (with a capital T) in subsidies every year for generations, and the fact that most of the products you buy are already manufactured in China.

Great point especially because the biggest way the US has subsidized fossil fuels isn’t even the trillions of dollars, it is the subsidization of fossil fuels through the foreclosure of young people’s future and every single generation after that running for thousands of years out into the indefinite future.

I don’t understand where you are getting the impression that I think money is the point, I never said that.

What I said is the labor of recording musicians being totally eviscerated by capitalism is a tragedy and that I don’t buy the narrative that this was inevitable for one second.

They already fired half the employees who work for Bandcamp, Bandcamp is dead as an entity, just because is still flying through the air based on its own momentum yet and hasn’t coming crashing back to earth doesn’t mean that isn’t what is about to happen.

Bandcamp has always been amazing because it was run not like a massive corporation and those days are over.

Bandcamp is in the rapid process of enshittification, so this is a temporary solution at best at this point :(

…what?

Are you angry at me for saying your friends were still getting underpaid for their labor even back then?

Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.

Again I don’t see any quantitative evidence to accept this framing of the status quo as inevitable or reflective of some fundamental tendency of human artists to overproduce art.

Capitalists have systematically stole the labor of musicians and normalized and absolutely absurd vision of austerity where the only way to make money is by doing things that people don’t want to do. It is absurd, and this ideology is pretty easy to locate the motivation behind, it makes us good compliant factory workers.

Like I said in my op: it’s good service for the consumer. It might not be if enshittification ensues.

Are you seriously throwing might into this sentence?

I suppose you could say when you throw a ball up in the air it might come back down but that is kind of being disingenuous isn’t it.

Here’s another thought, doesn’t it impact the quality of the service for the consumer if the workers doing the labor to create the substance of the service, the basic thing that gives the service value to customers, are not being rewarded in a sustainable fashion for their time and labor?

Do you really think all your favorite artists are going to keep cranking out music in this environment? More importantly, do you think your favorite artists would have ever been able to invest the time and effort to get big enough to become that 1% of the successful musicians if the environment they began in was as hostile towards musicians earning money as it is now?

The amount of quality recorded music being released is going to plummet as musicians just stop bothering to do it. We will look back on the 2000s-2010s as a golden era where music production tools were distributed and affordable but venture capital hadn’t yet destroyed the ability of up and coming recording artists and audio engineers to actually devote the time and focus to becoming professional.

facepalm we are literally the same species of Homo sapiens we have been for thousands of years, the problem is most certainly inherent in the system and we need to smash the system and make something kinder.

I don’t subscribe to this cynical of a viewpoint, it isn’t inevitable that recording music is not valued labor, it is a cultural choice same as any other.

I live in the richest country on earth, it is a subjective choice to devalue the labor of musicians and decouple it from the profits of music companies.

American car companies honestly deserve to get obliterated here, sorry it is capitalism shrugs.

If you make shitty cars that are totally out of sync with what the world needs and that makes you massively lose against a country that is willing to actually make practical EVs… then your company deserves to go out of business.

the artist now earns from stream payouts.

Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?

The issue is that artists don’t make any actual money on Spotify, they are being forced to put their music on Spotify because that is where you have to put your stuff if you want to be a successful recording musician.

Meanwhile a couple of years ago the Spotify ceo said in defense of completely destroying any semblance of money making from recording music:

“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek.

https://www.reddit.com/r/musicmarketing/comments/mlemlh/why_youre_9998_likely_to_never_make_real_money/

Streaming is great, but the structural evisceration of musicians and the value of labor in composing and producing is basically negative at this point given the huge amount of time that must go into a track to get it 100% there and ready for listeners.

It will change, I promise you. I am so confident I will literally bet my girlfriend’s chihuahua on it.

better hope lefties and artists get their shit together you tiny little monster

🤷‍♂️ not really, none of these corporations are real in any sense that matters other than sucking up actual companies that actually make the world a better place and mining the goodwill out of them until they are cynical, worthless husks that corporations use to fleece consumers into buying products from before they realize their favorite company/brand is dead in everything but name.

As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.

I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians considering the amount of work music production is.

It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and listeners won’t even give your song a chance on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.

🙃

It seems like https://resonate.coop/ is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).

Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!

I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.