Perhaps not all big tech is bad for art after all, or at least for musicians! This news has been posted in an article from the Wall Street Journal. I don’t know if you will be able to access the article from my blog site, since the WSJ has a pay wall. But since the Journal does allow their items to be shared via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you can go to my page on any of those three for an accessible link to the story. I had recently posted a link to a story that was all about how big tech is ruining the art world. That may still be true in the visual arts but it seems that music, at least, has been given a reprieve by Apple.

Apple invests in independent recording artists

“About three-in-ten U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online,” is the headline for a Pew Research report about online usage released on March 26th. The article includes an eye-opening demographic breakdown for people being online according to age, gender, education, ethnicity, geographic location, and income.

Forty-eight percent of people in the 18 to 29 age cohort are online “almost constantly,” followed by those aged 30 to 49 at 42%. A mere 8% of those 65 or older are constant users.

College grads come in at 42%, while high school or less are at 23%.

These findings are eye-opening and no doubt useful for a variety of business-related pursuits, such as marketing strategies. After all, if you want to reach your target audience, it helps to know what media they use, so that you can maintain a presence there. Purveyors of senior-related products and services probably should not be looking to social media, while marketers of Gen Z goods and services certainly should!

Here’s the link:

That’s a question posed by William Deresiewicz in his book, The Death of the Artist. He recently contributed an excerpt from the book to MIT’s Technology Review. There’s a link below but if you are not a subscriber, you will not be able to read the whole piece. Deresiewicz makes a very good case that art may no longer be sustainable in a world that, thanks to the Internet and all its myriad platforms, now makes art available for free or for next to nothing.

Take music for example. We all recall the major problems that arose with totally unregulated and unmonitored file sharing. Musicians and song writers were making art that people wanted but they wanted it for free. Now, those same artists are getting royalties from Pandora and the like but for 95% or more of them, it’s nowhere near enough to provide an even halfway decent income.

And visual art? It’s everywhere. Artists are finding audiences but no money. Stock photography royalties are a joke. And everything from logos to illustrations is being expropriated without payment or even credit given to the creators.

Deresiewicz makes the point that art has been demonetized. Art is becoming unsustainable, especially for newcomers and those who are trying new ways of seeing and sounding. Extrapolating from his excerpt, it seems reasonable for me to say that art may be stagnating, leaving us with a situation where an ever-decreasing number of sources are being followed and so many artists are abandoning their muse.

And the question arises, what happens to culture as art fades away?

Here’s that article link:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/23/1015478/death-of-the-artist-excerpt/