Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify.
It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
"The article suggests that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems. But it also proposes that the current system retains the striking inequalities and generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820953541
Here's an article about Germany, which claims streaming is not worse
"However, the current streaming-dominated music market does not fundamentally perform worse compared to the former CD market: in 2023, more than twice as many music creators earned revenues above the basic tax-free allowance compared to 2002."
References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point?
I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity.
The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.
In the context of the post-AI economic environment where we are casually talking about our TVs wiretapping our homes even when they don't have Internet access, the whole article reads so gross. How to make your startups more powerful:
1. Get your customers signed up and locked in ASAP
2. Make your product its own little feudal kingdom with walls, moats, and gates
3. Maximize the amount you slurp up customer data in disgusting ways your customers can't even comprehend
Steve Jobs was no saint but compare how he talked about products to how Paul G is talking about them, it's not even the same basic concept of business. For the former, it was about increasing profits by building the best product experience possible. People will spend more on a Mac or an iPod because it's better than the competition. Yes, there were plenty of forms of ecosystem and lock-in, but the way you locked customers in was by providing the best experience.
In the case of the latter, it's all about flexing your leverage and holding power over your customers. You don't even hold basic respect your customers in the system that Paul and the rest of Silicon Valley champions these days.
Capitalism is being replaced by Leveragism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FZy1lBNykA