Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

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Just to clarify, I agree with the general sentiment of your comment.

My concern, or confusion, or lack of understanding, or ignorance, or whatever you wanna call it, is less about the mechanisms of capitalism controlling distribution and moreso the sheer volume of music available. I posit that there is more well-polished music being released on a daily basis than people are capable of listening to, or that we even mathematically have the available time, as a whole, to fit into our lives. Even if we shifted the controls of distribution and such, there seems to be far more content than there are ears to hear the content, and I just don't get how we can ever expect everything worth it's weight in notes to be heard.

I understand the desire, as an artist myself, to be heard, but I also know that I'm one of millions of other people feeling the same way. If everyone's creating (and there are definitely far more creators than ever before), who's listening?

Am I crazy? Am I missing something?

No, you're not. You're dealing with principles of communism here. They're inherently nonsensical.

Note the standard of justice being used. It's not, "impersonating someone to use them as a stepping stone is wrong, no matter who does it, or who is the victim".

The standard is, the rich and powerful don't "deserve" equal protection from the law, the real victim is the artist who isn't being recognized because the industry isn't playing "fair". So it's ok if the underdog breaks the law, because the world is stacked against him.

Yeah, and basket ball isn't fair because I'm fat and uncoordinated, and math isn't fair because I'm stupid and don't want to study.

Ironically, these were the same people that said, "Nobody deserves a platform to spread the 'wrong' ideas." when it came to censorship on Twitter, and had the gall to call it "accountability" when people were banned for wrong think about vaccines.

If you're scratching your head and saying, "Wait, what am I missing? That makes no sense! Ten seconds ago it was the rich and powerful censoring the poor underdog, and that was bad. But now big pharma backed censorship is a good thing?" -- it's because you're the sane and logical person, and they're the ones without a consistent worldview.

> You're dealing with principles of communism here.

I don't know, the reasoning seems simpler than any school of thought can offer. Humans are bound to 14-16 waking hours per day. A large portion of those hours are taken up by obligations like work or chores. That leaves a set amount of time to consume media created by other humans. Even if more free time could be had, there will always be a hard biological limit of about 14 waking hours to consume things.

But more and more humans are being born and learning the arts, so combined with instant global communication they will inevitably produce and distribute way more than can be crammed into those hours. Look at a random streamer's Let's Play history for an example. If they play a longer JRPG then they can leave a trail of many hours-long videos per week depending on how long their sessions last. Sometimes that's to the exclusion of every other game in existence. It's a bit sobering if you think about it.

I read a book called The Plenitude by Rich Gold who discusses some of these topics. He doesn't go as far to give a fully workable solution to the problem but one of his suggestions is to challenge creators to limit themselves to 5 "big creations" over their entire life, and focus on honing those creations to the greatest extent. It's an interesting book and I'd recommend it.

>I read a book called The Plenitude by Rich Gold who discusses some of these topics. He doesn't go as far to give a fully workable solution to the problem but one of his suggestions is to challenge creators to limit themselves to 5 "big creations" over their entire life, and focus on honing those creations to the greatest extent. It's an interesting book and I'd recommend it.

Ooh, this sounds interesting. Thanks for the suggestion!

While I like the spirit behind Rich Gold’s suggestion here, I think he may be overlooking the fact that for a large number of artists the practice of quickly iterating and “shipping” songs is a fruitful one. Not every creation is going to be solid gold, but overall this mindset is a valid one for generating work with artistic value.

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