[seabass-labrax]

This is a bit bizarre; why would any musician take down their own recordings, where they continue to earn advertising revenue and gain fans? Even if they were planning to sell the recordings to a record label for some anniversary album, it would be daft to close down their main publicity channel. Very mysterious...

[ZeroGravitas]

Another famous example of this is the KLF who did they same. They also set fire to 1 million pound sterling of their royalties at the same time, so it was more an art thing than a bad business decision.

They time limited it to 23 years or the establishment of world peace, whichever came first, so it's available on streaming services now, though sadly not as a result of world peace.

[gpvos]

Yes, I'm only hearing of them now, so that robs me of the chance to enjoy a lot of their music.

[throwaway19972]

There's more to art than simply producing commodities to consume.

[dspillett]

A fair chunk of their output (that I saw) was commentary on other stuff (performers/performances/other) which is pretty much commodity content for easy consumption, not really art¹.

Perhaps this is the reason for taking it down: they want to concentrate on a more commonly accepted-as-art part of the careers and not have the other content distract from that for now? If so then perhaps once they've moved far enough forward in the new direction, that it stands on its own to their satisfaction, the old content will start to be republished for nostalgia points.

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[1] I'm not meaning to denigrate it, despite how that sentence may sound. It entertained many including sometimes me, so the content very much has value, but I don't generally consider commentary to be art.

[throwaway19972]

> A fair chunk of their output (that I saw) was commentary on other stuff (performers/performances/other) which is pretty much commodity content for easy consumption, not really art¹.

In what way is this excluded from being art? These are overlapping categories.

I do get your point. However, this might be incidental to the art they want to produce rather than central to their project.

[earnesti]

Likely just a bad business decision. People do these all the time. What is obvious to me and you is not obvious to everyone.

[soneca]

Or a conscious choice not related to business. It goes the other way around too, what is obvious to them is not obvious to you.

[stevage]

The more I think about it and read, the more certain it is they're just switching platforms. Even the phrase "ends chapter", it's not the end of the book, they're just making a change.