The story, Kelley writes, is “the tale of what happens when working-class consumption of popular culture overrides the interests or concerns of popular culture workers . . . a story about the limits of solidarity . . . [set by] consumers whose own self-interest may actually clash with the demands of laboring artists.”
The study estimates that the music industry has lost over £10 million in revenue to AI-generated content, but this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that one North Carolina musician, with a relatively small-scale operation, was allegedly able to generate hundreds of thousands of fake tracks, rack up billions of plays, and syphon off... See more
Music has emerged as private equity's recession-resistant darling, thanks to streaming's predictable revenue patterns and live entertainment's remarkable post-pandemic resilience.
In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major... See more
Though their advocates and spokespeople have a tendency to use the word union loosely, they’re better understood as advocacy and lobbying groups than labor unions in the traditional or legal sense. Despite UMAW’s robust social media presence, their numbers and structural leverage are fractions of those of the AFM.
The young would-be feminists flocking to “WitchTok” for advice on how to conjure love and manifest success are hardly atheists. Neither are the young men of the right who, if not crowding back into traditionalist churches, grope for a spirituality of strength, vitality, and meaning among the aesthetic ruins of ancient warrior cults. These are... See more
“As humans we are involved in a dance with things that cannot be stopped, since we are only human through things,” says Hodder. We will continue to perform lifestyles made possible by the Internet whether individual social media platforms survive or not, and even, especially, if we log off for good. Social media altered the world in the same way... See more