Most people agree 90% of everything is crap. Getting them to agree which bits aren't and which bits are is harder.

There is a difference between Pop Culture and High Culture.  The first is driven by mass consumption.  The second by other considerations.  This is not to say either is "Good" or "Bad," I'm talking audience appeal.  You can get 50,000 people to a rock concert.  You're not going to get that many to listen to Mozart's String Quartets.  

The finances of each follows ...  You can make money, sometimes serious money, venturing into the Pop Culture World.  In the High Culture World breaking even is a major accomplishment!  Pop Culture gets it's 'nut' from ticket sales, High Culture from Patrons and state subsidies.  

Pop Culture has a pull towards vacuous stupidity.  High Culture to insider snootiness.  

With music recording technology approaching the adequate versus live performance Music, Pop and Hi, has gone Scalable: two/three percent of the market participates garner 95% of the market.  Everybody else has a long, hard, slog merely to exist - never mind "Making It."  And this follows through with every 'genre' I can think of: Film, Fine Art, Theater, & etc.

From this stems ... both Pop and Hi Culture have their Formulas.  The closer one gets to the Formula-of-the-Month the easier it is to break into the two/three percent.  "Creativity," then, becomes "Clever Formula Manipulation" resulting in a banal, jejune wasteland of The Blahs.  Not so surprisingly, Pop Culture can handle this better than Hi Culture.  Pop Culture can depend on a steady supply of fourteen year olds who can be wow'ed by the Same Old Thing because it isn't the Same Old Thing, to them.  Hi Culture doesn't have a steady source, or at least to the same degree.  

In either case, the Internet is being used more as a marketing medium than a performance venue.  It takes skill - even genius - and long hours of gut wrenching slog-on to bring a work to where it is 'audience  ready.'  (Eye's nodes 'cuz eye's dun do'ed hit.)  Putting that much effort into a project with the intention of using the 'Information Super-Avalanche' (aka, The Internet) as your only venue is foolish: the chances of 'Making It' is very, very, slim.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

ThatBritGuy:

But people like potboiler novels and chart trash. They like it even if a suspicion that it may be cynically manufactured sometimes clouds their normally sunny and forgiving nature.

people like junk food too, till they get turned on, they don't know better yet, even if it's killing them.

ThatBritGuy:

In an ideal world we could all make art for social and personal improvement, while firing our own pottery and growing our own herb gardens.

you forgot the birkenstocks!

right now it's a scorched earth, it'll take time for the mycchorizae to regenerate, and that can't get going properly until they stop napalming.

ThatBritGuy:

In reality that's a very middle class fantasy,

if that is true, is it wrong because of it?

i think it's more universal than that, but i can't prove it.

artists are middle class by default, unless they become superstars, at which point they become latter-day royalty.

artisans are working class, aspiring, if we have to talk about class at all.

ThatBritGuy:

But does that necessarily mean that if you removed the homogenising control-freakish corporates of today, you'd get a sudden art explosion? Or that some people weren't doing it for money and sex rather than personal expression?

Removing the middle men on the Internet hasn't necessarily created an explosion of original, pithy, passionate creativity

why do i think of chernobyl, and the freakish flora that is springing up there?

making music for sex, hmm, a fair trade, honourable motivation, not always so the result.

music can help us remember we're animals at heart!

'personal expression' yes that is the holy grail i guess, but these words have been co-opted so thoroughly it feels funny to use them any more.

ThatBritGuy:

It mostly seems to have created a generation of imitators and wannabes who want the superficial look of fame without having anything interesting or challenging to say.

that is sadly ever the case, since way before the internet.

ThatBritGuy:

My guess is that in fact you wouldn't get more creativity by throwing money at art

maybe the aim is off. see comment about madonna.

ThatBritGuy:

you'd have to turn off the TV and radio completely first, because they always monopolise the creative space. With them out of the way, and more face to face art, something interesting might happen.

bullseye! the internet is a move from the total catatonia  of TV. the radio, pre tv, (like the first phonographs) actually was a force for encouraging musical creativity, due to its limited nature and social penetration at the time.

face to face is the ultimate acid test.

i love how you write, even when i disagree, lol.

does the house concert thing work in the uk?

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

That's an excellent novel, and should be essential reading on every economics course - and yes indeed, so very relevant now.