Interesting that the law suit was just against Frito Lay rather than PepsiCo.
> When I was a kid, if I saw an artist I admired doing a commercial, I'd think, "Too bad, he must really need the money." But now it's so pervasive. It's a virus. Artists are lining up to do ads. The money and exposure are too tantalizing for most artists to decline. Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product.
Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time.
I do not see many content creators in it 'for the content' and bringing a community together. There are definitely some but the algorithm isn't helping them.
> Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos. John, stay pure. Your credibility, your integrity and your honor are things no company should be able to buy.
I wish politicians were obliged to wear suits decorated in all the logos of their sponsors.
> Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time.
The difference is that artists used to be able to earn a decent living from selling their art.
Today, artists (unless they are actually producing physical artifacts) are expected to give their work away for free (or for so little as to be pointless).
I think part of it is that 60's and 70's music artists were a bit idealistic and "precious" about their "art." I think today's artists are more practical. Like, today, most rap songs with explicit lyrics have a sanitized version for general broadcast. Music artists in the 60's would have fought hard against that.
That's because in the 60s and 70s artists were much more likely to write their own music and develop their own sound. Today artists are mostly just performers who record labels hired because they were pretty and can be autotuned to sound okay and their songs are the product of committees that buy and then assemble a few hooks written by hitmakers and Swedish people before handing those hooks off to producers to finish, while the performer might get provide some token input or come up with a few lyrics as long as they work around the mentions of whatever products corporations paid the record label to include in the song (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/). That's obviously not always the case, but it's often not too far off. I'd recommend reading "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory" for some ugly details
It doesn't mean that that kind of music isn't any good, but it's often entirely commercial from the very start which makes it hard for artists who had little if anything to do with the creation of those songs to care about "selling out".
“Gimme the loot, gimme the loot (I'm a bad bad bad)
(What's mines is mines and what's yours is mine)” -Biggie Smalls
Most rap songs are explicitly bragging about how they will do anything to make money, and about how people that won’t aren’t morally superior but are either born privileged or just making excuses for being weak and soft.
It’s alien coming from an upper middle class white family, where people try to pretend they have less money and care about money less than they actually do, because it isn’t socially acceptable- people hide their supercar in the garage and drive an old Toyota when people they know are looking. These people are just as ruthlessly greedy as Biggie claims to be, they just hide it.
>were a bit idealistic and "precious" about their "art." I think today's artists are more practical
If you mean 60s and 70s artists cared about their art, whereas now they primarily care about the money, then yes.
>Like, today, most rap songs with explicit lyrics have a sanitized version for general broadcast. Music artists in the 60's would have fought hard against that.
Fighting for something you believe in and/or the integrity of your song? Such suckers!
> When I was a kid, if I saw an artist I admired doing a commercial, I'd think, "Too bad, he must really need the money." But now it's so pervasive. It's a virus. Artists are lining up to do ads. The money and exposure are too tantalizing for most artists to decline. Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product.
Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time.
I do not see many content creators in it 'for the content' and bringing a community together. There are definitely some but the algorithm isn't helping them.
> Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos. John, stay pure. Your credibility, your integrity and your honor are things no company should be able to buy.
I wish politicians were obliged to wear suits decorated in all the logos of their sponsors.