It’s something I struggle with. Some bad news comes out about some public persona doing something shitty and they get cancelled. But sometimes I really struggle with giving up the things they’ve made because I like them. There are also occasions where the person has been accused of something and it doesn’t seem true to me, or I think they’re genuinely sorry and have been punished enough, and the context isn’t being considered.
What do you think? Who do you feel conflicted about enjoying?
Most artists don’t have anything like that kind of cash or cache. Maybe some of the big corporate marketing babies but not many outside of that. I don’t have a significant worry that some guy is going to use my few dollars from bandcamp to push some political party regardless of their beliefs, and I don’t listen to marketing-powered, soulless pop nonsense that gets the kind of money behind it I’d have to care about.
Sure, if you only listen to small artists and you drop them when they get too popular I guess you can preempt this whole problem, but I don’t think practically you’re going to see all the fans drop an artists as they start blowing up.
I think what actually happens is that someone sells out and gets too much money and keeps coasting until a backlash drives their fans away from them actively (canceling). It would be nice if your self governing system worked but I just don’t have confidence it will ever overpower the marketing snowball effect.
Again I don’t think people are happy with how things are; it just seems to be how shit shakes out in an attention economy.
Depressingly, yeah. I keep circling back around to how harmful advertising and marketing are to society. We need to ban advertising, full stop.