[advael]

There's like not one but multiple microgenres of music you could likely cobble together just out of working musicians' songs complaining about the music industry. In the modern world, probably the by-the-numbers majority of working artists in every medium can effectively self-publish to some degree or another, so as the intermediaries have grown more and more demanding and both creator- and consumer-hostile, they have also become less of a necessary evil for our ability to engage with the works creative people are putting out into the world. Piracy is the most natural and reasonable way to use current technology to consume media, and the massively successful propaganda campaigns to instill a folk belief that it's somehow wrong or doing harm are incredible, given how much quality of life for both the producers and consumers of the actual content is lost in the name of marginal gains in profitability and massive gains in control by intermediary conglomerates that are increasingly unnecessary. It is only by a combination of this mythology and the ever-tighter industry collusion with an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state to make laws to terrorize people who just want their music that this parasitic shape the industry has taken is surviving

To me, the notion that a transferrable market-monopoly ownership of intellectual rights to a creative work was ever about helping creators is the kind of ridiculous farce that people like economists can get away with because we've been trained to believe that fancy experts saying counterintuitive things about "incentives" must know something we don't, but even if you believe intellectual property has value, it is not of value for massive corporations to sit on a chokepoint between human beings and their access to their own cultural touchstones