Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
If his song creates that kind of wealth, why not? What about a sports star that rakes in 100 million a year? If he or she can generate enough income money for advertisers -- then yes, they are worth it.
While I know some workers who get only 1000 each month but their work is worth less than that for the company, if you really analyze it. It is not about the effort put in, it is about the wealth created by work performed that determines it's "fair" monetary value. If a book sells well (instead of just being given away for free) it creates value for society. It generates income for many people involved in its creation or distribution.
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I'm not so sure that the is creating wealth for anyone but the artist. Much of that would depend on how the song is monetized. It might create work for advertisers, but that is unlikely. Advertising is a cannibalistic industry. If people don't view one thing it just means they will view another thing and the advertisers would follow the audience. Of course you could argue that it drives more people to the internet or whatever place the advertisers are working, but again, that just means that people are going from doing one thing (watching tv, driving by billboards, walking on streets filled with advertising) to another thing. No extra value is created for advertisers.
Obviously, no one else makes any money off the creation of the song over thirty years after its made. Most of the people involved in the production of a song don't receive royalties. As far as distribution, there might be some wealth distribution there, but again, unlikely. There's always opportunity costs to spending. If a consumer spends a on the song from 1972 that's one less dollar he has to spend on something else. If anything, longer copyrights hurt modern singers and song-writers, because people are spending their money on someone who is no longer producing music instead of people who are still making music. If anything longer copyrights are damaging to the economy because they contribute to the concentration of wealth in the hands of people who are no longer productive, thereby decreasing the purchasing power of the rest of the population. A dollar spent on recently created music will provide jobs for lots of people such as sound engineers and editors, whereas a dollar spend on a song from forty years ago only enriches the artist and maybe the executives of the record company.
Overall, society spends way too much money on entertainment industries. Athletes, movie stars, pop singers, collectively make billions even though there are still glaring and troubling problems in the world. I don't blame artists for this, nor do I think we should resort to more centralized methods of distributing wealth. It is more a reflection of the modern consumer, of the extreme short-sightedness, selfishness, and hedonism of most people. But you cannot say that the entertainment industry is creating wealth or needs to be a bigger chunk of the economy; if anything, it is massively diverting wealth from more important areas of the economy.