I've been a professional musician since the end days of selling CDs, and I would like to say that having experienced the decline of CD sales because of piracy transition into the paid streaming era it's unambiguous that musicians were better off when mostly everyone was pirating and then some people bought CDs or other merch out of a desire to support vs today when everyone pays a nominal fee to a corporation that pays us nothing and also satisfies their desire to support despite not actually offering support.

I would much rather you pirate anything I have made or worked on vs listening on streaming services, which are an objective nightmare for musicians. Even if you never intend to spend a penny, normalizing piracy is better for us than normalizing the current capitalist-realism nightmare where you get whatever you want and also get to relax into the fiction that you aren't exploiting musicians because you pay the price of one album per month to a giant corporation so you can feel ok about it.

Meanwhile, even quite relatively successful mid-level bands and artists can barely afford to tour anymore because CD sales used to put gas in vans and buy food and that's gone replaced by nothing.

Musicians will keep working harder than anyone could imagine, touring is a nightmare 24/7 slog where once a night you also have to be able to generate enough energy to make a bunch of people's night a special unique experience for them, while you are doing it for the 20th consecutive night.

They will put their youth, or their whole lives into creating these things that are so meaningful to everyone, and they will lose money, and mostly find themselves old with little in the way of job prospects once you guys are done using their ideas to give your liges meaning.

People take it for granted, and think music is an unending well of meaning you can just take and take and take from as long as it serves your needs and capitalism makes it available to you.

You will never be required to understand your role in the systems of capitalism in order to participate.

And having it pointed out that you are participating in exploitation made possible by corporate control of technology isn't a specific personal attack on you, so "yeah but I really like the..blah blah blah" response isn't good enough.

Do you think musicians should be robbed of the frankly already pitiful amount of money we have traditionally received for putting our entire lives into something that almost everyone considers massively important in their lives?

Are you willing to give yourself a little less though?

Mostly everyone is willing to pay lip service.

I like the ones who actually punch the nazis, the ones who confront the transphobes and make it awkward, I like the rifle club people who go protect the drag queen story hour, I like the people who give money directly to people who need it even when they don't have much because rich ppl wont, I like the people who confront their friends about toxic behaviour

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@clowncollege
Reading this, it strikes me hard that almost the exact same words could be written by or about engineers, or the very same internet developer/dreamers who contributed to building the platforms that destroyed musician's livelihoods.

context: I (d)evolved from being a musician/live and studio sound-engineer/producer/stage-hand to online network builder and general tech helper for what seemed like "good causes" during the 90's.

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