alt Hacker News> The tragedy is that we want artists to have reliable income
If artists create art that people are willing to pay for, great!
I don't really want to pay artists for art I don't like.
I remember when Nirvana suddenly became successful. Many in the local community called them "sellouts", which is quite unfair.
I like the kind of output artists make when they work on individual creative projects. I don't really like the kind of output artists make when they feel they need to crank out something every week that has to have roughly equal appeal to the exact same audience.
But the way the internet (and other mass media) scales means that only the latter can really have a business model and reliable income attached.