fooooobarbaz

> And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans.

People love to say stuff like this, but having gone through that grind myself, it's not nearly as easy or accessible as you describe. These platforms also make it easier than ever for artists to face things like copyright strikes and takedowns, which people are more than happy to abuse.

Additionally, streaming royalties pay peanuts for the vast, vast majority of artists and they get to determine how artists are paid based on calculations they determine. For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.[0]

Sure, it's easier to platform your music, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to generate meaningful income, particularly when you need the service to be priced as cheaply as possible in order to get reach. In the long run, I think this is going to further incentivize entertainment that is created passively and augmented by things like AI, which I'm personally not that excited about.

0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-...

The clipper chip comes to mind. Of course "progress" is a relative term, but NSA surely saw it as progress. Companies like Uber are now leaving some European cities[0] after facing a more adversarial political environment than they do in the states.

I've also heard stories about places like Uruguay, which have laws that apparently protect some workers from automation and self-service (i.e. attended gas stations, etc.)

0: https://thenextweb.com/news/uber-forced-leave-brussels-what-...