Hello Chris, Donald.
Yes.
My appreciation for artists, and makers, is independent from considering it an ethical issue to respect business models that rely on ignoring or criminalizing technological progress.
I don’t subscribe to Valenti’s Boston strangler argument. The VHS has come, gone, and forgotten.* And yet still film and television and video arts persist.
Surely, I can agree that there seem to be less big-name acts like Aerosmith these days making Aero-bucks. Surely, I agree that bootleg selling at swap-meets is detestable. But, I think on the whole, the rise of internet-culture and video-game culture has created more opportunities for more people to make income based music or image-art (motion, static, photog, cgi, whatevs), than before.
To me, artists that cling to older pre-internet notions of how to make money are like take-out restaurants that don’t post their menus online.
/* no book club jokes, please.
