Kanye is both a cultural icon, and also regularly sounds unhinged. That’s not a value statement, just an observation.

A corollary observation would be that many very pivotal figures in history regularly sounded "unhinged".

Sure. John Wilkes Booth, Timothy McVeigh, and the 9/11 hijackers were all, in some sense, pivotal.

The quotes around "unhinged" were to imply positively pivotal figures — like Leonardo da Vinci, Walt Disney, or Steve Jobs — not categorical terrorists.

Clearly it was intended to convey a positive association. I think it's totally fallacious to imply that unhinged is a positive attribute; hence the rebuttal. Unhinged is just unhinged.

Sure, the crazy people who made a bunch of money (or the terrorists) are the ones you've heard of. The majority of "unhinged" people are probably not better off for it.

Steve Jobs is kind of a great example. On HN people fawn over him, but he was "unhinged:" he was a giant asshole to everyone, by all accounts, and he opted for snake oil over medicine during the earliest part of his cancer treatment.

Plenty of people get lucky and strike it rich or contribute meaningfully to society without being unhinged. There is no meaningful correlation here.

Well, let's see.

West has billions, is a recognized musical genius, is now setting fashion trends and will go to bed tonight with Kim K.

I'd say he's doing pretty well, compared to most.

This is an extremely weird argument to get into.

ew. :)

Howard Hughes comes to mind.

Perhaps it's marketing. Observable reality !== reality

Always a possibility; it’s not like I know him personally or anything.

How do artists actually collect this kind of cash these days, now that no one buys CDs? Wouldn't he need a trillion or so streaming listeners to generate a billion dollars?

Edit: never mind, looks like he's selling sneakers.

Live music industry is also bigger than it's ever been. Obviously not so much this year but booking fees for big artists run into the millions. They also get paid to feature in other peoples' music/content, and then again for access to their built-in promotional/marketing networks. They're selling hype. Anyone focused on milking profit out of the actual recordings themselves is stuck in the past, for the most part.

The modern model is to share the music freely as it serves primarily as a sales pitch for the artists brand. Young people want something of "value" for their money and they don't see a recording itself as having even $0.99 of value (even though they've mostly forgotten how to actually pirate media), like shitty overpriced merch and miserable "live music experiences" and "meet and greets".

Really what they're selling is hype. Which explains why an extreme manic depressive like Kanye has been so successful in this context. It's a system that directly rewards con men and effectively punishes any kind of caution or prudence. It also rewards drug addiction as many of these con men rely on drugs to maintain the illusions of their existence.

It's particularly sad because this system exploits the earnest passions of both the artists and the fans to manipulate them into participating.

It's more than just 'CDs' or 'Downloads' for artists these days, which which is pretty much not what they just do to get revenue. It's from their merchandise, investments in other companies and also founding their own companies which actually makes them their billions.

Think of Dr. Dre's Beats, Jay-Z's Tidal and investments in Uber. Now Kanye's Yeezy brand too.

>Think of Dr. Dre's Beats, Jay-Z's Tidal and investments in Uber. Now Kanye's Yeezy brand too.

Don't think of the time Soulja Boy tried selling bootleg game emulators[0], though.

[0]https://www.geek.com/games/finally-soulja-boy-is-selling-boo...

> How do artists actually collect this kind of cash these days, now that no one buys CDs?

For big artists it’s mainly going on tour. Doing a tour tends to generate more money for an artist than the album itself and it’s been this way for years now.

Ed Sheeran’s tour grossed almost a billion dollars ($776.200.000) .. that’s 1 tour. He did 2 before that.

For smaller artistes - Merch, concert tour sales Larger artistes might get a better cut from the streaming service?