It really explains the way attitudes concerning support for family and friends now don't make any sense... People who grow with family and friend support go much further than those who don't have it now because even corporate America reinforces value based on likes and shares.
By listening to the music or supporting art of your piers, they can potentially become career (and profitable) artists, which in turn can make them profitable enough to buy their mother a house and help their family members and friends financially, but now, somehow people don't see any benefit in supporting friends and family BEFORE they succeed ad become popular. People will spend hours doom scrolling on TikTok and not once scroll through friends profiles, because it's somehow more difficult and less appealing than content from strangers, when in fact, it's likely the same, but with less ads and likes, and views, because they are not popular.
This is the state of the world, where independent musicians, artists and business owners are foisted into competition with large companies that are vastly better staffed and funded, and everyone competes for visibility on one timeline, with competition and discovery becoming impossible without backing by major corporate interests or by spending a lot of ad money, this fuels the growing wealth divide, and skews the markets into a controlled nightmare for entrepreneurs and people who want to be free of corporate "day job" dependency.
I don't think people really understand how terribly they're ruining the ideal of independence and generation of new money by having an attitude against supporting local businesses and individuals, family, and friends, even if their work doesn't match the perceived quality of the larger industry, the playing field is skewed now more than ever.
Things simply won't change until we scale down and return to local communities, and keep big business manipulation out of them.
1. They keep doing it over a long period and on a scheduled basis. For example, putting out rap albums on SoundCloud every week for two years. You can’t help but check one out and see where all this effort is going.
2. They put it on a platform that doesn’t let you immediately judge how popular it is. It’s easy to see how many likes your medium post has, it’s hard to gauge that on your homemade blog.
Social media platforms have large bases of users that are looking for specific content, but they are very geared towards likes and followers, and that is what ends up also being a barrier if that support is low for a creator. When individuals click like on a post, it now increases the outreach of the post to more and more viewers, making that brand of support more valuable.
It's not fair of course that visibility is mostly driven by engagement now, but simple clicks from friends helps independent creators go far beyond those limits, whereas sponsored and wealthy artists can simply pay for ads to cross the visibility barrier, and already popular creators already have "fans" to keep them visible. So many great, and even well known artists and musicians simply quit now because of this artificially generated glass ceiling that drives profit only for platforms, it's a shame.
Primarily though, I'm also referring to musicians needing to scale down to building local communities and their own web sites again (like the old days with message boards etc, but updated to add similar/good features and functionality of modern social media sites). So that visibility is not based on fruitless payola.
If musicians pull back in protest to these limitations, there would likely be a swift response from platforms in order to retain and reward creators properly, the challenge would be holding platforms to proper account for all the obscene profit they make off of currently unpaid work of independent creators.
2022 - Nobody wants to try anything
Why? Because of the inherent risk.
1980s - We started with floppy disk based computers. There was no real danger from trying anything. We used to boot write-protected operating systems. Making a copy of the OS or anything else took a few minutes swapping disks, but was almost trivial to do.
2022 - There are so many layers of code running that even the OS doesn't know what's going on in modern hardware. You can't ever be sure you're back at a factory default state. There is always a risk any time you go to a new app, new OS update, new web site, etc.
We need an OS that controls the entire machine, and defends itself completely from applications. Until we have that, nobody is going to want your new app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)
But you are right. Today I'm afraid of even downloading Acrobat Reader.
I can think of one thing like this, the web browser! Sure it isn't a OS, but damn it can run one.
I don't trust any browser that much. I never worried about the shareware disks and my PC, ever.
