The Pomplamoose Problem: Artists Can't Survive as Saints and Martyrs
artistempathy.com
artistempathy.com
This is utterly and painfully familiar to me.
Before I dove into retraining as a programmer, I was a self-published tabletop roleplaying author.
Tabletop RPGs are an incredibly small space, and part of the reason they are a small space is that no one pays anyone for anything. I wasn't even self-published because I didn't have publisher interest in my work: I was self-published because when publishers approached me and I sent them quotes asking for less than a penny per word, they would still balk and tell me it was too much money or just stop responding to my emails.
And yet, when you talk about this publicly, when you discuss that maybe the reason so many of the industry's most legendary designers all leave and write for video games is because they literally weren't making enough to live, people react to you with hostility and derision. You may as well be spouting Marxist propaganda on the street corner, all for the crime of suggesting that someone actually be paid enough for their work to make it worth doing.
You hear new ideas, things like pay-what-you-want, or free-ebook schemes, which conveniently all seem to involve giving them something for free with the understanding that somehow this will magically turn into more sales.
It rarely does. IF you're big enough and visible enough, or when you first make a splash on the scene, some of these tricks can work for a short time. What actually happened in all but one occasion was that a whole hell of a lot of people just decided they were more happy to get something for nothing and my sales actually went down (though downloads of course, went up.)
Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero.
They're still all too happy to watch/read/play the hell out of it, and tell you how amazing your thing is.
Just don't ask them to give you any money for it.
Quite. The big gain of copyright was to liberate artists from that to some degree and put them on an economic footing of productivity, where their work could be valued for its commercial potential, with the reasonable proviso that people who wanted to enjoy it would pay to purchase it in some form. Despite the flaws of the publishing industry this worked pretty well and there was a cultural explosion that paralleled the industrial revolution.
In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers.
I read the original Pomplamoose piece and while I respected the position of 'hey we're a startup, and while we haven't made it we are making it, plus being in a band is awesome' it nonetheless radiated an air of desperation. The cold hard reality is that you can do a 2 month tour, play to packed houses of paying fans, and still lose $10,000. Criticisms that they paid too much for the stage show are misplaced; it costs money to hire those things, and you need some of those things so that people say your show was fun and exciting rather than dull and boring. People go to a concert to be entertained, after all. Traditionally, bands signed deals with labels because labels have the capital and know-how to promote music, much as studios have the capital and know-how to put out films and so forth. It's very very hard to build up that capital organically, and it's also very hard to produce a marketable product without a capital investment.
Indeed. I think the problem of artist market value isn't supply, but that people have this idea that creating something is somehow 'free,' that creative work involves no actual work and therefore should just magically fall from one's arse.
"Fun" doesn't put food on the table. And creative work is incredibly labor intensive, perhaps more so than any other job I've done, from factory labor to line cook. Because it never ends. When my shift was over at a 9-to-5, that was it, but as a creator? It never switches off; you constantly have to be revising, creating, brainstorming, and promoting to have any shot at making it.
One of the only guys I knew who was actually making enough off RPGs to call it a living was working 40-60 hours a week on top of a day job in (I think) insurance. Another guy I know who manages to eke by does it by writing sometimes as much as 10k words or more a day for as many as two to three different books at a time plus freelance work (by comparison, Neil Gaiman, best-selling fiction author, recently wrote that he considered 2k to be a very good day). When I was still writing I generally had to make about 2.5k to 3k a day to keep up with any kind of profitable deadline, and all for books that at best were likely to make a few grand in the full life of product.
And then everyone wonders why people quit the market ...
Second, this reminds me of a conversation I had with a tattoo artist friend of mine. We had had a few drinks and he started ruminating about the state of his industry, most notably the sudden surge of people who would book slots, wait for a few months, show up twenty minutes late woefully prepared to be tattooed, and then complain about paying him $150 an hour.
He explained how he would love to tell them that they weren't buying an hour of his time; they were compensating him for the twenty five years he spent sketching, taking art classes, and learning a wide variety of mediums. Moreover, it wasn't as if they showed up and he slapped some flash on them - his work was custom, involved research, and a significant amount of planning. Alas, if he dared, he feared that word would spread that he was a prima donna, an elitist and a fake artist.
And, tattoo is one of very few fields where visual artists can make a good living...
It's not though. Labor prices are set by the interaction of supply and demand, and quite simply the supply of creativity (especially music) far outstrips the demand for it. The vast majority of the general public would probably be perfectly content with there only be 1000 musicians in the world, so there's not inherently high demand.
On the flip side, there is huge supply. People make music because its fun——lots of people make it as a hobby. Very few people write actual business-ready apps just for fun.
This interaction of supply and demand applies just as much to programmers. Salaries for game programmers aren't lower because game programming is somehow easier or in less demand, but because it seems fun so the supply is huge.
Until you somehow convince most people to not be hobbyist artists (reducing supply) or to listen to way more different music (increase demand), it's going to be impossible to find lucrative business-to-fan business models.
I really don't expect anyone to pay me for the open-source experimentation I put on github for free. But if you want me to write the boring line-of-business application for your company, then I want to get paid.
If the consumers are unwilling to shell out the amount necessary for a ticket to see a show at a profitable price point, then we've voted with our dollars that we don't think it's worth it.
The truth is that the market for entertainment is an accumulatory one. Each year, new entertainment is created, diluting the value of entertainment created in previous years. It's an unfortunate truth that entertainment persists because the marginal cost of reproduction is practically zero, meaning that once piece of entertainment is created, it doesn't take much to sustain the availability of that entertainment for consumers ad infinitum. Musicians aren't competing against other musicians active in the market. They are competing against every musician that ever lived and recorded music. Not only that, the market for music is competing against all other entertainment markets, which also suffer from this deflationary effect.
Any way you slice it, the price people are willing to pay per unit of entertainment keeps going down and will keep going down.
The reason other markets, like the enterprise pay better, is because most of those other industries are in the market of generating free time (time === money) at the end of the day. They are generating free time to consume for their owners and money to apply to activities to fill that free time. They also generate efficiencies that allow consumers to have more free time. People are willing to pay for things that generate time and money. Entertainment does neither for the consumer, thus the demand is lesser.
Furthermore, the cost of creation is not proportional to the entertainment value of the creation. Just compare meme subreddits to a Michael Bay movie.
I don't know about you, but I'm not terribly bothered if many people can't make a living as a musician. There is absolutely no lack of good music out there that everyone who isn't a neophile could not be entertained for the rest of their life. This doesn't mean that new music shouldn't be created, but that the bar for the "quality" (by whatever measure of quality you may prefer) of music that will earn you a living is that much higher.
The good news is that all the people working to increase efficiencies in the world is helping generate more free time for the average person and helping reduce the cost of the instruments and equipment necessary to make music, such that the creation of good music is increasingly within the purview of Joe Q. Consumer.
I don't know about you, but allowing more and more people to entertain themselves through the act of creation instead of consuming the creations of others, to be a great improvement on the world where only those that can make a living at something have the time and means to create.
For whatever it's worth, I used to listen to music hours upon hours per day for many years and haven't really listened to much music in 3-4 years now because I prefer silence when I am creating (coding).
Creation is the hardest form of entertainment to compete against and never has creation been so accessible to so many.
What is the alternative for 'begging'? That's a loaded term for what could be considered 'advertising' or 'self-promotion' instead. Do you suppose artists are entitled to cash that falls out of the sky proportional to the effort they put it? Where, then, would be the accountability that what they do is actually valuable to someone? Would you rather art be funded through a government grant system, where people are "begging" and dissembling and using political connections to get their money?
Don't confuse value with price. The price is zero because the supply is incredibly high. Partly because the tools have been democratized; it's easy to pick up a guitar and start playing, or a digital camera and start snapping pictures.
That's all artists want. It's not the least bit unreasonable of them.
No, I just suppose that artists are entitled to us paying their asking price for what they offer -- or not getting it at all, if you can't be bothered with paying.
Or, to put it in another way, it's the consumer that is NOT entitled to free art when that art is put up on sale by its creators.
The answer can't be anarchy obviously, but it also can't be installing spyware on every device to stop copying. The larger public has shown that they're absolutely willing to throw every single artist under the bus in order to free themselves from the shackles of copyright.
The intersection of art and business is somewhat really weird. You're making something whose entire reason for existing is making people feel nice in some way, but it's never an actual physical product like a bar of chocolate. It's an experience. Depending on who you ask, that is either the most important product of civilization, or some useless baggage tying up useful hands. You need to make the former group pay you money. Fortunately, people understand that things cost money and should be willing to pay you a reasonable price. Unfortunately, most middle-class and above people fall in the latter camp, so most of your fans will be poor and for them a reasonable price might be less than what you want to get.
Personally, I have never paid more than twenty bucks for a game.
Actually, unless you have competing sources of near substitutes, a market can't work (or at least have the properties that are held to make a market ideal) period; allowing purchasers to set prices against the wishes of sellers doesn't solve this problem, it just changes the details of the failure.
To the extent that works of art are not easily substituted commodities, they simply do not support an ideal market.
> But with art, a nearly-equivalent alternative violates copyright
No, it doesn't, unless its actually derivative. Copyright protects against copying, not coincidence.
Well, who said it has to work as a competitive free market merely for any particular and very specific album/song, instead of at the genre level?
Besides, buying it at the artist's asking price has worked for 8+ decades -- for as long as there were physical media.
And indeed, Patreon is a good example of the same principle: KS and Patreon creators get no end of shit on, often worst of all from their own fans and even paid supporters. You are demonized for asking for money, and then demonized for not offering more than you can afford for that money, demonized for not being transparent enough, picked apart and demonized for what figures you do release, and then further demonized for failing to live up to that expectation on release.
The market clearly does not favor this kind of product, but the amazing thing is how often I still hear about friends wanting to get into selling software or games to consumers. I always tell them to consider getting into the enterprise market instead, which is comparatively boring but has a reasonable chance of providing non-trivial income. Say what you will about corporations, but they actually pay for software.
My advice to anyone with similar options is to sell software to businesses and maybe hardware to consumers. This effectively rules out most entertainment products. Some people are not discouraged by that, but those people will almost certainly be working day jobs for the foreseeable future anyway. I'm lucky to have enough free time and money where continuing work on these projects is possible without compromising on quality of life, but the odds are they will never be a primary source of income and I'm OK with that.
You simply didn't create something engaging enough. Popular games make a lot of money.
Take Minecraft - it was created by one guy and made hundreds of millions of dollars before he actually turned it over to a team.
Whining about models and price schemes and markets is pointless. If you want to make money, you have to create something people are willing to pay for.
> The market clearly does not favor this kind of product
Is the same as what you're saying. Obviously I didn't create something engaging enough to gain traction organically and become profitable. The point of the story was just to provide another anecdote supporting the claim that that is a difficult thing to do in the entertainment industry. I hope it did not come across as whining.
I guess we could all go make free to play games that are designed to exploit consumers and get them on an addiction treadmill. Because that's ethical.
I once took a shot at writing and publishing a GURPS compatible adventure, independently, and gave up because SJG either forebade it or simply made it too annoying. And that was the "final straw" beyond already knowing that my total hourly ROI for the project almost certainly would have been bad. Far too bad for a craft that takes such a rare and above-average set of intellectual skills.
However I was "lucky" also to have been programming since childhood, and that is one field that historically does pay well for one's time.
This is equally true of my work as a scientist, as a software engineer, as a poet (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) and as a novelist (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...).
The market value of what I create (science: moderate, software: very high, poetry: almost zero, novel: barely more than almost zero) has nothing at all to do with my enjoyment of the act of creation, which is extremely high in all cases.
Some of my work I do for free for various reasons of my own, but mostly you have to pay for it if you want to have it, and I get to say that because it's my work. I own it. I made it. I created it. I'm an arrogant prick and if you don't like that... too bad. Go rip off someone else's work. I'm making good money from the stuff people are willing to pay for, and having lots of fun with everything I do, and so the loss is all on the side of those who can't appreciate the value of my other work.
If you think you deserve the output of my creativity without paying me simply because I enjoy the act of creation, the problem is all on your side.
Presumably some employer pays you to do your work as a scientist and a software engineer, and in the absence of that incentive, you would not do identical work.
Furthermore, enjoyment that comes from creating art requires your more basic needs to be satisfied (food, shelter, sleep, health, etc.). We can't just pay artists nothing and expect them to enjoy their art they way they would if their basic needs were satisfied. How much art can you create if your stomach is empty, if you're worrying about being able to afford your child's healthcare, if you come back tired at 6 pm from your day job?
People can quibble about how much they spent on lights etc but none of it would have made an order of magnitude difference. Plus, Pomplamoose is comparatively huge - I've seen that touring/merch argument made against the indie that only has 1-2 CDs out and simply wants their cd/recordings sales to cover the production costs of recording the CDs.
I wish Pomplamoose had broken out their "merch" number - how much was from selling posters/t-shirts, and how much was from selling CDs? The fact that they were even bundled together almost as an afterthought is another indication of how devalued it has become.
Yeah, I hate this argument so much.
Touring is labor intensive, often risky, and scales badly except for the biggest acts. And there's also a degree to which it's competed against by any amount of freely released music (yes, they're different experiences, but ask yourself why the live band market labor became considerably tighter when recorded music came into its own).
Merchandising is another way of saying musicians should have other jobs besides music.
And saying that is another way of saying you don't really care if musicians can use more of their time to either improve or increase their output.
(Which I guess is fine if you really don't care, but own it, don't pretend we're in some kind of new magic economy that makes those fundamentals go away...)
The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost. A non-rivalrous good with zero marginal cost will therefore trend towards a price of zero. Digital copies of things fall under this category. Therefore, you cannot expect to be able to make money by having a profit margin on each item sold on these types of products. You cannot make money this way.
You may lament this fact, but it is the reality. You will have to make money some other way. There will probably never arise a perfect substitute. The worst case scenario is that the modern but pre-digital age was a golden age for production of these kinds of now-digitizeable things, just as ancient Egypt was a golden age for the production of pyramids.
But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and you can’t complain that there isn’t any substitute business model to cover your situation. Reality is what it is.
① http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...
This is really the problem that copyright was meant to address in the first place -- once industrialized publishing hit, marginal cost of production was always cheap compared to investment required to produce the first work. Digital changes the degree but not the character of the problem.
Of course, that's really only half the equation.
> You may lament this fact, but it is the reality.
"Reality" is a pretty fluid concept when you're talking about money, markets, or value, all of which are largely cultural concepts.
It's arguably accurate to say that right now we're tending towards a culture where people don't pay for digital copies of media. That doesn't make it the only possible reality.
Yes, but it wasn’t zero, like digital copying is today.
> Reality" is a pretty fluid concept […]
Sure, there are laws like Copyright which change the normal market forces, just like any other country can have laws changing society. But the principle, the trend for the cost towards zero, is the same, Copyright notwithstanding. Copyright sort-of worked when the marginal cost was small but non-zero, but when it actually hits too-cheap-to-meter zero, then it starts being ridiculous.
> […] culture where people don't pay for digital copies of media.
This isn’t a “cultural” thing. It’s a “normal market forces” thing, which was my point. If it were a cultural thing, we could influence culture to turn the tide and actually affect things. But it isn’t, so we can’t.
Thing X doesn't pay, therefore I don't have to pay you for Thing X, you should've gone into something else if you wanted money.
Baloney. I can think of no other field where the kinds of man-hours involved are as devalued. Yes, supply is generous, but so is demand, at unprecedented levels in human history. We are a culture grown fat and rich off its own cultural products, yet which routinely refuses to actually pay for any of them.
Labor isn't free in almost any other market, so why should you get to demand someone work 80+ hours a week for nothing? Explain to me how that fits any sane market theory.
The entitlement explanation to behavior probably isn't the right one here.
I would also argue that artists can't make money off of art because it isn't simply art that sells. There's a whole marketing and visibility and polish machine that could be exploited, if you had enough money and power. I would argue that for many profitable art works, it's companies and investors who win -- those who have power and money. Artists are just employees unless they make it huge, and that only really happens in the music world. And on this tangent of the music world, I would note, as a curiosity, that most people wouldn't be able to identify the artist of some popular visual art as readily as the artist of some song.
Artists are just living in a world where most means of discovery have been capitalized upon by other businesses into a pipeline that you must pay to use. People like Macklemore are just rare exceptions.
You comment looks like a sweat-of-the-brow argument. Like, if I spend a lot of effort and time doing something, and then as a result have a product which the world doesn’t value, why should I still get paid?
> We are a culture grown fat and rich off its own cultural products, yet which routinely refuses to actually pay for any of them.
If this could be shown and quantified, then we would have the data necessary to create some system to use this effect to national advantage. But we don’t, so we can’t.
Also, I think you are arguing disingenuously when you say that I “demand someone work 80+ hours a week for nothing”. I do not. People are free to do whatever they want, and will get compensated according to what they can get paid from other people.
Not really, you can't actually make new works of art based on old works of art, since copyright forbids that. Technically you can, but they have to have been released before 1920 and that date will never change. You will never, ever be able to use Mickey Mouse in your own cartoon and you will never ever be able to take a sample from an earlier song and put it in yours without paying to whoever happens to own the license for it.
To me, the real solution is not go pay more for labours of love, but to institute a shorter workweek so everybody can pursue their own labours of love on the side.
For a while I believed that all the new music production tools out there meant that the market is flooded with crappy music released by hobbyists giving it away for free. The system affects of that sort of thing is that the listeners are bombarded, they shut down, they don't have the opportunity to reliably discover "good" music, and that therefore people writing "good" music fall through the cracks, don't earn money, eventually stop writing, and culture is worse off.
But... I'm coming around to the view that the market is pretty much flooded now with "good" music. I'm being hand-wavy, defining it as merely music that deserves to exist alongside other "good" music. If that's true, then it's a different model. Great for the consumer, they can probably subsist on a healthy music diet received for free. There the only path through for a musician is to try and invite fans into the "family" and hope fans will pay a premium for that. But still, you're going to have artists that write good music fall through the cracks and stop writing - it's just that in those cases, culture isn't necessarily worse off.
Ok, so this is going to be controversial, but...do we really need people to keep making art? At least as a profitable venture?
There's already more art, music, movies, books existent than I could ever experience in a hundred lifetimes, and there's no reason to think that recently-created art is better or more interesting than older art. It's not like it's getting stale. Would it really be that bad if artists stopped making art? If people don't want to pay for it, maybe artists should stop? Eventually maybe society would want to pay for it again?
The reason people don't want to pay for art is not that they assign a value of zero to it; it's that they have figured out a way to get it without paying the artist.
Making a living as an artist is a dream only the tiniest fraction of privileged people have ever been able to do. Of all the economic injustices in the world, the fact that it's a lot of work to scrape by providing some awesome entertainment is not one that justifies a lot of sympathy and certainly not one that we should destroy cultural freedom and technological freedom over. It's nice to be transparent, and I don't mind Pomplamoose's original article. The artistempathy.com article is hyperbolic and out of touch.
The musician as star concept dates from the vinyl and radio era, when manufacturing and distribution of records, and getting airplay, created a mass market for rock stars. That was a brief historical anomaly. For centuries, almost all musicians were nobodies, outranked by bartenders. Now, with the tools for making and distributing music available to everyone, we're back there.
You are in a business where, unless you're really good and really well promoted, you don't matter. Deal with it.
Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_yo...
The usual BS about "being creative", "practicing hard" and getting a leg up the competition is also not really helpful. It's just advice for the individual, not a systemic solution to a problem (that might not even have one).
So art goes back to being for trust fund babies and people with day jobs. Successful artists need to find a cultural niche and work it.
http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe...
(So what if they paid X for lights? If they wanted _those_ lights... etc.)
Because it discredits them. It isn't far off from when Fox News dismisses the problems of poverty with "but they have refrigerators" or when people (often around here) yet to reorient reality so that the cause of poverty is buying $5 quality-of-life improvements instead of societal economic intent.
It helps folks sleep at night.
Paying yourself... $15k (?) then complaining that you 'lost' money... just seems a bit weird.
They are a business. If they didn't make money, or even lost money, then they didn't take care of the financial side of things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405
I have a problem with both of these ideas (from different comments here, and I did cite them). First of all, I think it is in the best interest of the world to make a lot of stuff freely available to the masses. I think the world is a better place when some things are readily available. It is a form of public education. I don't want culture to be something only rich people can afford.
Having said that, yeah, if you are doing something creative, it takes a lot of your time and you should be compensated but that doesn't mean business stuff comes naturally to creative types.
I have a done a lot of stuff over the years that I have reason to believe benefited other people. I don't feel I have gotten enough financially out of it. I don't think that is just a case of me being stupid and not business-savvy. I think some things are just hard to monetize and I also think some things are hard to accomplish at all and may be impossible to accomplish if you have to worry about how to also monetize it.
I am encouraged that we now have things like Patreon. I am encouraged that we are coming up with new alternatives like that. I still don't know how to effectively pull off the things I want to do and also monetize them. But one thing I am clear on is that I would like some things to be freely available because I don't want some things only available the The Haves. I think that increases the divide between The Haves and The Have Nots. And I think that is one reason monetizing art is a hard problem to solve: Because it shouldn't just be for the rich. It should enrich the lives of many. Yet, no, the artists should not all be starving artists either. I am not a fan of martyrdom.
If anything, as stereotypical lower-income music lovers I find the minority who are familiar with the DRM express a desire (right or wrong) for greater access to free or low priced music, both for themselves and others worldwide. The general desire is to increase the ease with with those who love music can access it. Many wouldn't object to better DRM (if they knew what it was) but the emphasis would be on better modes of distribution with less economic discrimination.
Anti-DRM sentiment is often repeated blindly by pirates and neckbeards ("but muh software freedoms!") but when looked at economically, it makes all kinds of sense.
Some people really want to be paid for their work.
And perhaps the biggest threat to this is buffet streaming services like Spotify, which give the veneer of legitimate participation and remove incentives to buy, but reduce the remittance to artists to a vanishing fraction of what recording purchases can provide.
> I don't see the reason for the downvotes.
Perhaps because this reads like "you have to want DRM if you care about music" with no supporting argument.
I don't believe profit is the best motivator for artists and much of the music I listen to (and all of the music I make) is made by unpaid producers. With that point of view DRM is entirely uncalled for. I'm not trying to argue that point of view here, just presenting it as a contrast to reveal the hidden assumptions in the assertion made above.
Then we don't live even in the same world. By taking into account how much people has the economical means to just "make music for the sake of it", I'd believe that a very small proportion of all artists actually don't seek profit for their work.
That aside, I believe that the right to defend your intellectual property is of extreme importance and the digital counterpart to ensure that right is, guess what?, DRM.
If your platform (i.e. the internet) does not give you a way to protect intellectual property then creators will eventually dissapear or move somewhere else; you can't expect to just get things from some place and never put something in return for that, a system needs to be sustainable in order to exist by itself.
DRM tries to make the overall creator/consumer ecosystem more sustainable, and there's nothing wrong with that. That is the supporting argument behind "you have to want DRM if you care about music".
A few things. First, seeking profit doesn't mean its the motivator. Second, my meaning was that profit as the primary motivator seems to have a degrading effect on the quality of the art. By "best" I meant "best art" not "greatest quantity of art."
You can argue DRM all you want, I'm saying it's not relevant to everyone who cares about music.
https://twitter.com/forexposure_txt
Not down with DRM in the slightest, though, but that's because it doesn't work. Even the first-run benefits of it for big companies doesn't exist for the long-tail market of indies. You're very off-base and you're advocating a path that only hurts people.
There's nothing wrong with asking for money for your art, but if you only got into it because you figured you could make money on it I'd rather you had no representation in the scene. Selfish? Yes, always, and I make no apologies. Nor should people asking money for their art.
Jerk though? For having an opinion—and not even trying to convince anyone of it? There are far better reasons to call me a jerk.
Nobody gets into art because they think they could make money off it, but the opportunity cost of being good at it is so high that it's extremely rare to be good at art and not need to eat off of it. The rhetoric you air is the damaging, poisonous kind that encourages disrespect to artists as living human beings because they don't martyr themselves.
That's kinda nasty then, with the name-calling and all.
> The rhetoric you air is the damaging, poisonous kind that encourages disrespect to artists as living human beings because they don't martyr themselves.
That's bullshit. I've clarified myself, so you're now deliberately misinterpreting my words and presenting false choices. You can't tolerate a differing opinion and have to resort to namecalling and specious claims.
I'm not saying you need to have to agree with my personal position on DRM or on music, but don't tell me I have to like DRM on flimsy circular grounds.
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-on-t...
The problem with Pomplamoose is that they spent a ridiculous amount of money on silly things. Their loss.
But as soon as creative class workers are threatened, HN is falling all over itself defending copyright law (a government regulation!) as just and right and natural.