Modern payola. Fascinating but not entirely unpredictable. I’m excited by the focus on hyper-local, authenticity is the scarce resource. Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”. No amount of algorithmic magic can create that experience.
Recently rereading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and I'm struck by his belief that certain art or memes are objectively good and destined for virality. I think both Gibson and this author are wrong. No content is intrinsically destined for success. There are countless amazing artists, available to anyone. Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes. If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.
It doesn't surprise me at all that this is going on. There are lots of social media fan pages that are run by real people who post real content 99% of the time but are willing to post promo material for a fee. Usually that fee is pretty high, easily $100-500 depending on the account's follower count, with different price points for how long it stays up (pay more for a permanent post, pay less and it gets deleted after X number of hours). It's really effective because those accounts already have a well-established presence and function as tastemakers.
Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right.
It would be nice if that were true.
AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might.
Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
Nobody has an intrinsic right to anything, but I believe art makes the world a much nicer place to live in, inspiring people to behave and advance society in more direct ways.
It’s hard or impossible to fairly select people, because someone has to produce food, shelter, etc. But I believe society should strive to allow more people to spend little enough time and effort in other work so they can devote themselves to art and other creative pursuits.
I'd like to know more about "Chaotic Good Projects" [1]. Isn't it fascinating that they so openly do "UGC" (user-generated content) and "Fanpages" even though they are neither users nor fans, but paid consultants. And even openly displaying the musical acts they performed these dark-pattern services for.
Not sure how this is ethically different from industry plants or payola. Things which have been in the industry since the dawn of time. Astroturfing with fake fans is just the natural next step due to how easy it is. Back in the day some labels would drum up fake engagement by handing out tickets to influential people, paying certain people to go, and things like that.
> One day after this piece went up, Chaotic Good made significant changes to their website — including pulling the “Narrative Campaign” section completely.
I checked the Internet Archive but I cannot access any of the archived versions. Apparently the website uses JS to display its content and the IA can't deal with it. Internet searches show that the page existed, though, so I'll take the content deletion as proof.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 42.7 ms ] threadIt would be nice if that were true.
AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might.
Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
It’s hard or impossible to fairly select people, because someone has to produce food, shelter, etc. But I believe society should strive to allow more people to spend little enough time and effort in other work so they can devote themselves to art and other creative pursuits.
[1] https://chaoticgoodprojects.org/
it's no secret that being an artist is a tough path with little chance of success
I checked the Internet Archive but I cannot access any of the archived versions. Apparently the website uses JS to display its content and the IA can't deal with it. Internet searches show that the page existed, though, so I'll take the content deletion as proof.
This is going to become more and more popular sadly.